A combination of real drive and a tremendous amount of dumb luck. Never forget the dumb luck part though. Life isn't fair, ask Trevor Moore who wrote a song about that, oh wait, you can't, life isn't fair...
Tell me you don't understand conditional probability without telling me you don't understand conditional probability.
CEO of Reddit, how'd that go?
Project Covalence, how'd that go?
Andrew Yang? Our next president, right?
2018, The year Sam Altman became the governor of California, no?
And of course: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to." - that aged well.
But he's now in a position where all his failures will be forgotten and his successes amplified forevermore (unless he buys a social media company, but he seems too smart for that so far). It is clear he has reached Jeff Dean levels of ridiculous hagiography though, but I guess worshipping CEOs is a step up from worshipping invisible friends or stinky geriatric ex-presidents so there's that.
So that's totally on brand for sama, no? He runs with the herd because he has a great nose for where the herd is heading. But it's the crazy outliers who dig into stuff like this and find the best options. I suspect he doesn't have time for that nor would he make the time. Wonder what choices Zuck made for his $100M apocalypse man cave.
Why be sorry, large sample sizes more or less guarantee the generation of outliers. But once someone attaches mythology to the event, you get another Sam Altman. Worldcoin alone should raise a lot of questions about his supposed one of a kind brilliance, but it didn't, so here we go again with another auteur too big to fail now.
Let one man make one (50/50) prediction once a year from the time he is 20 until 50. One in a billion by chance, but by numbers its had to occured. Attach some mythology and tada.