[FredPret]

Looking at the wildly hostile media coverage of him post-2015, you’d come away thinking he’s a major charlatan.

Looking at the glowing media coverage of him pre-2015, he seems like a unique business genius.

The truth is probably in between.

Business and marketing aren’t rigorous intellectual activities like math, but they are bloody hard in a different way - even with an inheritance (how many born-rich kids die 100x richer? Almost none). The problems are very fuzzy and open-ended, and frequently don’t even look like a problem.

You can’t consistently solve these problems profitably over many years without some skill.