[inglor_cz]

"Worth merely $700m."

So, 300x less than his brother. Quite a difference. Two orders of magnitude are a lot. The gap between those two is as big as a gap between Kimbal and a random person who inherited a nice home in California worth about 2,5 million, but has nothing else of value.

[svnt]

And it’s another similar multiple drop to the average American. I’m not sure your point.

Musk is an outlier and we will never know who would have held those positions if he didn’t exist. On the technology front I’d argue it’s far more likely we would be equivalently close to self-driving EVs than not.

In my experience billionaires are unique in their proximity to money and relative desire to accumulate wealth, and their lack of attention or concern for anything that does not serve this outcome.

If they are inherently unique perhaps it is because they cross-wired the evolutionary modules for threat detection and scarcity avoidance.

[inglor_cz]

My point is that explaining away outliers as a result of a long string of random positive events is as unsatisfying as elevating them to some superhuman status.

I find the idea of "they are what they are because of pure luck" intellectually lazy, unless it is well supported by statistics - which is something that Nassim Nicholas Taleb did for so-called superstar stock exchange brokers.