[tomlue]

It is also possible to mistake results based on skill for luck and randomness.

It feels better to believe that the success of others is due to luck and that your failures are due to randomness. Sometimes, other people are more intelligent / skilled / harder working.

It is certainly possible to beat index funds, many do so, some of them are mostly lucky, some of them are mostly skillful.

[Kosirich]

I think I agree with the point you are trying to make, but I would do a hard distinction between entrepreneurship and allocating funds on the stock market. Strong arguments for what I think you are trying to say by Sometimes, other people are more intelligent / skilled / harder working are made by Peter Thiel in his "Zero to One". The argument he makes is that there are more people who have succeed more than once. (success defined here as a multi billion business)

It is certainly possible to beat index funds, many do so, some of them are mostly lucky, some of them are mostly skillful. - That is the trick ain't it? The hole point is that there is no way to distinguish between the two (a priori) and no way to deduct if it will lead to future success (posteriori).

[eloff]

That's an interesting tidbit from Zero to One that I've forgotten. It's very rare to find someone who has founded more than one billion dollar plus company.

There are some good reasons for this:

- If you created such a company, you may still be running it. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Ellison. By the time you retire from that you're super wealthy and old, there's little reason to start over.

- Founding a company is HARD. Few people who went through that once are interested in doing it again. Paul Graham wrote about how he feels that way, although he did do it again with YC.

But I think the point is fair that success at that level requires not just skill but a lot of luck of being in the right place at the right time with the right idea and the right combination of skill and connections to pull it off. It's extremely unlikely.

You can certainly say Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg are skilled and they work hard. But it's clear they were also very lucky.

[drchickensalad]

This is why elon musk is so incredible imo

[eloff]

Yeah, the world could use more people like him. He's mostly not motivated by the money. After making $1B from the PayPal exit he could have just retired and bought a yacht or an island. He wants to de-carbonize transport and colonize Mars. Both to give humanity a better chance at surviving into the future.

That's three billion dollar companies so far and counting. Is there anybody else who's done that? Not to my knowledge.

He quite likely has some kind of savior complex, he's quite literally trying to save the world.

A fascinating and incredible human being.

[Applethief]

Save the world? Oh, please. He just wants to be the first. The first to do it at scale.

The fact that you think he's doing it for humanity is laughable.

[feteru]

Also Jack Dorsey.

[eloff]

He works hard, but his contribution to humanity in the form of Twitter is a tire fire. It's even questionable if humanity is better off for having it.

Square is a fine company, but let's face it, it is not changing the world. It's just another payments company with nothing particularly special to make it stand out.

I don't think you can compare him to Elon Musk, except again, the fact that they both work hard. Plenty of people do.

[jgalt212]

Square makes most of its money granting pay day loans to small businesses.

[shawnz]

> It is certainly possible to beat index funds, many do so

Regardless of whether it is a matter of luck or skill, in practice almost nobody has beaten index funds over long periods like 10+ years.

[Liskni_si]

While it's probably stupid to think about it this way, anyone who's done nothing for the last 10 or 20 years and then bought TSLA one year ago can today be described as having beaten index funds over the last 10 or 20 years. :-)

[0xEFF]

Perhaps, but skill is more rare than luck. More importantly there’s no way to tell the difference.