The latter is just his nature, the former was a combination of extremely high risk tolerance, confidence and luck. I'm sure there's been many Elons but they floundered or got shut down before they got so much money they could keep doubling down until they win (for a while).
The vast majority of comments on this website are from smart people that studied computer science, discussing many topics, talking completely out of their butt and often times being totally wrong about subjects outside of their field.
Being educated in one field doesn't always translate into other fields.