I had north of $100k and basically put it all on the line for something and then had north of $300k and basically put it all on the line and then had north of $100k and then put some of it on the line and had north $150k and then put basically all of it on the line and had south of $0.
eta: I am also interesting.
Acknowledging that someone Elon Musk or Joe Rogan influences a lot of people isn’t Great Man Theory.
It’s actually kind of the opposite of Great Man Theory. It’s the Dumb Man Theory.
A lot of rich CEOs seem to all say basically the same thing that they were never in it for the money and it was all about their idea or their dream or w/e - leading them to just go HAM on it and what happens, happens. So I guess that puts him in the luck camp for me but he could still be smart, i guess.
Have you all ever watched one of his dry technical interviews? He’s much different from Trump in that he’s actually very knowledgeable and knows stuff in great detail. The problem is exactly what is outlined in one of those articles posted above, which is that biases and personality disorders override rationality and lead him to believe that he knows more than all of the experts combined. That’s weird because he isn’t a scientist or engineer making the discoveries himself, he’s just assimilating and regurgitating all of the shit they discovered and told him about. When he talks about optimal material matching based on coefficients of thermal expansion in the construction of a frame, it probably sounds impressive to Joe Rogan subscribers that are scientifically pseudo-literate and can at least parse some of the words he’s saying. But that’s a different tier of person he’s charming. Your QAnon aunt in West Virginia who thinks Trump is “smart” is operating in a much lower dimension and couldn’t decipher Musk-speak any better than alien hieroglyphics.
“He’s not lucky, he just put all of his money into two ventures that happened to hit!”
This makes sense to me: Your Honor, Jack Dorsey just wanted a socialist golden parachute. If he cared about maximizing shareholder value, he would’ve tested the market by competitively bidding it out. :-)
I just think luck is an inherently unilluminating way to look at the issue, because it’s very hard to distinguish between luck and skill. If you try something and it turns out to be a good idea, is that luck or skill? If you were sure it was a good idea beforehand and your reasoning for why is borne out, then it was probably skill. If you picked something to do by flipping a coin, then it was probably luck. But there’s a vast grey area in the middle where you use judgment to pick a course of action where the best option isn’t clear, and there’s really no way to distinguish between skill and luck if your choice turns out to be a good one. Maybe your judgment was no more informative than a coin flip, or maybe it was just as good as complete certainty. There’s no way to tell other than looking at a big sample of results.
Whether or not something is a good idea doesn’t seem very correlated its success either. There’s sort of an unstated assumption that the degree of success or failure is indicative of inherent qualities, but that’s clearly not the case in people or projects, and I think that’s where you have to accept luck as the most important variable.
There are plenty of people who are as smart as Musk with good ideas and the drive to see them through, but not only will none of them achieve his degree of success, many of them will fail trying. If you want to ask why has Musk been so successful it’s easy to point to reasons, but it gets a lot harder when you ask why him instead of somebody else. His ideas aren’t a million times better than everybody else’s, but his net worth and influence is.
If luck weren’t the most important variable you should expect success to be, if not linear, certainly nowhere near real world asymmetries. Pointing to the things Musk got right isn’t very interesting when so many other people got them right too, only to maybe receive a consolation prize for their efforts. Or bankruptcy.
Totally weird take from the Ukraine invasion is a myth a con and people wearing helmets are fakers guy!
Really? I’ve heard that Bay Area traffic is ridiculous.
Maybe that’s it. A couple of years before pandemic I went to a conference in SF that was a few days long. I saw a friend who lives somewhere around Mountain View. I was commenting about how it must have been a shitty commute to get to SF and she was like, “Yeah, I ain’t doing that. I just got a room at the hotel across the street.”
On a Friday at 4PM? No way. 40 if it’s a real good day. 1 hour is more likely than 30 minutes between the airports.
This is the critical point. There are other people who are about as smart as Musk and about as driven, but they don’t achieve the same level of success. If you stipulate that there’s no reason, then it has to be luck (whatever exactly that means) and it’s not very interesting. But if you allow for the possibility that the question might have an answer, at least in some cases, then it could actually be informative. That’s extra true since many of the distinguishing things about Musk’s style are commonly thought to be bad. If he actually was a superbrain genius who made all his business decisions by the book, that would be the most boring answer—we already knew it was useful to be smart. But is his micromanagement actually contributing to the success of his businesses in some way? If so, how? Is he doing something else to counteract the expected downsides of being too hands on? How is he using politics and his visions of the future to market his enterprises to investors and customers and engineers? How does he work with government? All potentially very interesting questions to think about.
Sociopathic behavior is pretty clearly correlated with business success. Show me a billionaire founder and I’ll show you an absolute freak. With a hit rate near 100%.
I think you’re looking reasons to believe the world is fair and makes sense because it’s more palatable than one where some rich kid with all the worst qualities of a douchey tech bro stumbled into the right place at the right time often enough to become the wealthiest person alive.
55-71 minutes depending on whether you get the express, and it’s Caltrain only in that area, no BART
I think it’s mostly all grade separated, so a tunnel wouldn’t make a difference. A tunnel is just another way to achieve grade separation if the typically-cheaper ways are impractical due to how developed the land is. So I’d guess it’s all the stops and less of a fully-express option. And would not be the least bit surprised if the trains are speed limited by bought off legislation or just a resistance to upgrading track and equipment for faster speeds.
And this is just the route from San Jose to Millbrae station. Looks like you got your route time by going to the airport, but that’s a bit of a detour that involves changing to a bus that you have to wait for. They wouldn’t do that, going to wherever they’re going. So they’d likely stay on Caltrain going further north into SF and possibly switch to BART or a bus. But that time isn’t going to add more than getting out of the airport and onto Caltrain or driving a car.
San Jose to Millbrae is almost 40 minutes in dead of night with no traffic. So, faster to take Caltrain almost any time of any day, but it could be even faster if the government made it a priority
They finally opened the first San Jose BART station last year but it wouldn’t help in this case because it connects to the Oakland side of the peninsula so getting to SFO would involve taking a bus from Oakland once you’re done with a 55 minute BART ride.