[tenacious_tuna]

I've come to believe that there's a certain amount of insanity required to be a great entrepreneur. Like Jobs or Musk--their personal qualities aside, they both had arguably legitimately insane visions that they refused to let people talk them out of.

The side effect is they're also crazy in other ways (Musk-time and the billionaire-playboy-cyrptocoin-gambler being easy examples), but I think it really does take someone who operates with a totally different set of constraints on the world to pull Really Cool Stuff off. Like reusable rockets. Or electric performance cars. Or an incredibly versatile computer that fits in your pocket (while also giving the middle finger to Flash, the incumbent web media tech at the time).

[hilbertseries]

Steve Job didn’t invent the smartphone and Elon Musk didn’t invent the electric car, they did both make those things cool.

Steve Jobs also had a treatable form of pancreatic cancer and died from it, because he refused traditional medicine.

You can point to countless inventions and advances in humanity that are not due to crazy asshole geniuses. What happens to people is that the better you are at something, the more willing they are to forgive your flaws. This allows those flaws to grow and grow, to the point where you’re accusing random people that insult you of being pedophiles. But these flaws are not a requisite part of being driven and not giving up.

[baybal2]

There are way more insane people in mental institutions than insane billionaires.

[bigiain]

Hmmm, I wonder if the ratio of "insane billionaires : insane people in mental institutions" correlates to the ratio of "sane billionaires : sane people (presumably not in mental institutions)"?

Are you more or less likely too be a billionaire if you're insane?

(Is there even such a thing as a "sane billionaire"?)

[throwanem]

It depends on how we define "sane", doesn't it?

If we just mean "not evidently delusional or psychotic", then probably a billionaire is no less likely to be sane than anyone - probably if anything more so, one power of money being that of reliable access to medical care.

If we instead by 'sane' mean "firmly grounded and operating within consensus reality", as I once heard the term defined, then I think the question becomes considerably more interesting. (Whose consensus?)

[satellite2]

Classic correlation / causation bias