A thread to clean up the phone sidetrack in the Elon thread.
No one will give me credit for it, but when SpaceX and Tesla fall apart now that Elon has cooked his brain with drugs and is spending whatever lucid time he has living out his Eichmann fantasies, it will vindicate my claim that he is (or was) a visionary business genius.
The complete crash and zeroing out of tulip prices entirely vindicates me spending my entire life savings on 3 tulips.
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How does actively destroying his empire demonstrate the empire took skill to build?
Sure, if this happens it will demonstrate, I guess, that building the empire required Musk to be less fucking insane than he is now but that’s a big gap from visionary business genius.
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Before you even get into Musk specifically, the problems with assuming he is a business genius is that it takes an insane amount of luck to become that fucking rich. So while you probably do need some baseline amount of intelligence, and you definitely need an unusual amount of ambition and (for the paths Musk has taken specifically) an unusual risk tolerance, the variance just swamps all of that.
It’s like assuming someone is a poker genius for winning the WSOP ME. Yeah, it demonstrates they aren’t a complete fish for sure. Beyond that, eh…
I don’t think Elon Musk is a stupid man from, like, a raw intelligence perspective (though I definitely don’t think he is a genius either) and he was surely not always this insane. But he is, at this point, so incredibly high on his own supply that he thinks he knows best about literally everything and in a lot of ways that is a lot worse than being stupid.
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Musk didn’t start Paypal. He didn’t start Tesla. He didn’t start Twitter. He started SpaceX, and it would have almost surely failed without getting billions from the US government. Businesses that he didn’t start collapsing when he is the CEO and has gone insane is more likely to suggest he isn’t a business genius than that he is, imo. He’s a rich kid that ran hot.
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Exactly how much evidence do y’all need before you realize that successful businessmen are just as fucking dumb as everyone else? The whole country’s been gaslighted while these dipshits prance around doing Nazi salutes and dying in comical submarine accidents.
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If Elon Musk wasn’t doing anything useful at his companies and he was just lucky/reliant on government handouts, then he quits paying attention to them so he can kill Medicare to give himself handouts, that’s got to be bullish for the companies, right? But if he’s a visionary business genius who’s vital to the success of those enterprises, then his lack of involvement is bad. Time will tell.
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honestly having elon spend all his time playing president and doing diablo or whatever is probably a huge positive for tesla shareholders
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Maybe this is an Ender’s Game type of deal where the guy Elon pays to play video games for him is actually unwittingly running a space program.
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I don’t follow these debates closely, but I think a point I’ve heard a lot of people make is that Elon Musk is useful, just not in the way he wants people to think. He’s a pretty good salesman, good at selling a vision and getting the government to invest billions in his enterprises. He’s not a super-intelligent technological genius engineering savant, though.
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They aren’t quite as dumb as everyone else. Everyone else is pretty fucking dumb on average.
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I see that bobman0330 still hasn’t watched Being There starring Peter Sellers
Even if we grant that “obtain government subsidies in areas the government is writing blank check contracts for due to trendiness” was visionary and so was “build nerd cult for cover on obscene labor practices” and so was “take advantage of ppl who love building stonk tech bubbles”
Even if we grant that, you still have to prove Elon Musk calculated this stuff, rather than his generational wealth and his vast array of personality disorders being in the right place at the right time through little to no cunning of his own
You want it to be one way, but first you need to learn about survivorship bias and confirmation bias and a bunch of other shit you constantly talk down to others about, because your Dunning Kruger is just that strong
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https://x.com/MattBruenig/status/1892935233940427021?t=fDvMMRdqc-p8PY_jIN1Q1Q&s=19
https://x.com/MattBruenig/status/1892936615883882943?t=d9GdFE_vhMcJ4sHf8yZ2aQ&s=19
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hes got tbe gift of bullshit. It’s a real gift, but doesn’t imply intelligence
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Does he? He’s not a convincing liar at all.
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No it’s true. The database in cobol uses a default date 150 years ago. So if no birthday was in the record it defaulted to that date. All those 150 year olds were born on the same day.
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the market seems to disagree with you
What if I told you the markets are incredibly easy to dupe.
I agree on the iq thing and think ~115 is the perfect bs’er range. 80-90 iq people (lots of people) are going to think he’s super intelligent, he’s only ~1 std deviation away from them. he’s not likely to talk above their heads. meanwhile people 130+ (I would assume a lot of this board falls around there) will look at him like he’s a moron, and fail to communicate this to people 2-3 std deviations below them, who will think the 130 people are just blathering nonsense (because they dont understand - stupid people tend to think everyone is as dumb as they are, and if someone starts talking over their head, assume the person is full of shit or just dumb).
It’s a really strange phenomenon watching so many otherwise reasonable people think this guy’s actually intelligent. I know one very intelligent person that fiercely insists so, but I think he’s trolling me a little bit. Of course there’s also a lot of the idiotic belief pervasive in US culture that wealth == intelligence.
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