[stormbrew]

> buying only like 10 tickets in their whole life

Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No. Each one was built off the previous success. Without paypal there is no tesla (or at least not involving him). Without tesla there is no spacex. These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.

And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him. We can't test the counterfactual. His success is only evident in hindsight and the only proof that it's somehow unique to him is the fact that it happened.

> Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.

The claim here is that Musk is uniquely intelligent and that somehow explains his outsized success. That implies the people who don't have his success are not as smart as he is.

Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.

[kortilla]

> Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No.

More or less yes. Read up on how close spacex and Tesla came to imploding at the same time.

> Without tesla there is no spacex.

You’re confused about the timelines there.

> These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.

Again, you think it was just PayPal doubled down to Tesla, which then somehow turned into a war chest for SpaceX or whatever. Tesla and SpaceX happened in parallel, spacex didn’t get help from Tesla, and both ran out of money from PayPal.

[panick21_]

> Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No.

So because he once made 23 million. Making 23 billion $ is not impressive?

> And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him.

Tesla had his money but not his leadership and was run straight into the ground. Musk took over and now its making almost the same amount of money as Toyota.

> Without tesla there is no spacex.

What? This isn't accurate.

> And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him.

There is a long history of rocket startup before and after him. And non are SpaceX. Most failed. Beal Aerospace being a good example. There was a company called Rocketplane Kistler that could have been SpaceX but failed.

So yes, we do have quite a bit of evidence that starting a successful space company is incredibly hard even with quite a bit of money behind it.

> Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.

And perhaps you need to reverse your thinking and realize that huge success without hard work work, intelligence is very unlikely even if some luck is also involved.

[stormbrew]

> And perhaps you need to reverse your thinking and realize that huge success without hard work work, intelligence is very unlikely even if some luck is also involved.

I said none of these things you're reading in to my argument.