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by hnbad
1062 days ago
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Common falsehood that people believe is that rich people are smart. The biggest early factor to Elon Musk's wealth was lucking into Peter Thiel merging X.com into Confinity/PayPal. Thiel likely anticipated that Musk would have tanked X.com eventually but it would have been much worse for Confinity if it had done so given its market share and the rippling affect that could have caused in the market and user trust. X.com largely operated on hot air, riding the Dot Com bubble. The massive jumps after that directly stem from his Tesla shares, which are massively overvalued. Basically he bought an EV company right when greenwashing and solar/electric was the new hotness and founded SpaceX mid-way to the tail end of a space optimism/tourism and "nerd-cool" (i.e. rise of super hero movies in mainstream media, widespread enthusiasm for "tech gadgets", etc) trend. He used SpaceX to make grandiose claims about technological developments which in turn fed into a hype cycle of vaporware projects like the Hyperloop, eventually allowing him to position himself as "real-life Tony Stark" further boosting his credibility with no actual qualifications. I'm not saying his success isn't real, but his success doesn't come down to him being a clever business person but more to being a meme. He turned himself into a brand and that brand carried Tesla stock to absurd heights but with Twitter's failure that brand is becoming increasingly toxic and he's stuck turning dials and checking if people are still cheering while also trying to relive his young adulthood high of X.com, except we're no longer in the Dot-Com bubble and he doesn't understand PayPal did him a favor by kicking him out. |
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I agree with all the rest of your points, but I think the problem with this is that Elon really is smart. It is just that you can see that he was mostly a really good salesperson of his personal brand. He also had his finger on the pulse of what was "cool" (internet, space, electric cars) for awhile (a lot of that is probably luck, but there has to be a certain amount of talent there I think--but that talent for fashion always wears off).
He's also smart enough to be able to regurgitate what SpaceX engineers tell him and to manage to sound like he's got a PhD. He must actually study that pretty well and be at least decent enough at physics/engineering that he's clearly above-average intelligent. But it is other people making the breakthroughs in the mathematics of how to hoverslam rockets, he's a bit more like a CEO version of a science communicator.
The thing is that people are largely just ignorant about where all the technology comes from (Lars Blackmore worked at NASA JPL when he published the first articles on successive convexification of the landing problem -- so the US Government really invented hoverslamming rockets), and they are horrible at judging what kind of intelligence a public personality actually has. They also think that smart people are smart at literally everything.
And as much as I hate to admit it, Donald Trump was also smart, but his talents are almost purely sociopathic. And one of those talents is being able to actually lean-in to a shitstorm of stupid that he creates around him, and make his sycophants write it all off as 4D chess. That is actually a talent. A genuinely stupid person wouldn't be able to pull that off.