“He’s waving around a chainsaw! get it? because he’s SLASHING the budget! he’s a genius”
The most important factors to business success: ability to bullshit, no shame/willingness to bullshit, willingness to fuck over anyone and everyone, and luck. Intelligence is wayyyyyyy down the line.
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This is 100% correct
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I mean it depends on the business. If you require funding then bullshitting is by far #1.
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This is just great man of history refracted through caliper genetics. I don’t think you could prove, even if you believed in a great man of history thesis, that those great men had higher IQs. It seems like they’re working backwards and saying because they were “making” history, they must have had high IQs.
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When SpaceX is the biggest company in the world as it turns to war contracting and builds AI controlled weapon systems, the Elon boosters will gloat about that for the very short time humanity has left.
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Correct, and add in Musk’s case, risk tolerance. Pretty fucking “dumb” to Martingale your money to ~infinity even if the odds on each bet are slightly in your favor but dude obviously has a bottomless black hole in his soul that can never be filled.
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I know I have said this half a dozen times in these pages, but I still contend that all IQ arguments are begging the question; full stop. Seems like another good example.
A few months ago I promised never to post about IQ, but with all the eugenics discussion in the news I wonder if we should have an IQ thread here. I would start it but I don’t think that this is a topic I could discuss with even a modicum of humor or wit at this point lol. What I will say is that if there is any evidence of the theory of IQ leading to any great utility or insight, I don’t know of it.
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Right - the current value of Tesla is not based so much on the actual business, but on the Musk hype/showmanship. If Musk leaves and the stock tanks, it’s likely going to be a result not of any changes to the underlying business but the evaporation of the Musk premium.
Also, right now a lot of the Musk premium is also the belief that he’s going to extract value from the US government and direct it to Tesla.
Go for it. I love the IQ discussion because it always boils down to just asking “OK cool bro, what if you’re right, what should be done with people who are more stupid that other people?”
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if i had a nickel for the amount of cigar lounges i’ve been banned from for arguing with people over the great man theory, i’d have two nickels… which, you can’t do anything with two nickels, but still, that’s more nickels than i should have.
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I would posit that high intelligence people have a harder time becoming super successful business people because (at least in my experience) high intelligence comes with other things like poor social skills. I agree that the number one thing to becoming highly successful in business is the ability to shamelessly promote yourself and bullshit.
There’s plenty of highly intelligent business people, they just aren’t billionaires. They’re millionaires and you never hear about them.
There’s a fairly popular view in the masturbatory discussions around this topic that highly intelligent people also possess high EQ and great social skills. I’d posit with enough anecdotal and historical evidence that extraordinarily high IQ’s, in the ranges that cant be measured reliably, are likely maladaptive in terms of fitting into normal society. People like hawking are probably just survivor bias, I imagine many people simply go mad.
I’ve learned from my time in cigar lounges to not discuss anything meaningful with most of the other patrons of the lounge. My lounge has a small group of liberals that I mostly associate with and discuss important things. I mostly only discuss how shitty the Seahwaks are with the other (almost entirely right wing) patrons.
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It’s one of those ideas has been debunked over and over and over and really doesn’t make any sense when you think about it, yet like an enormous percentage of people think it’s real. IQ testing is just astrology for racists that somehow has permanent currency in our society.
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Whether or not Elon is a world class Business Genius™ or has an IQ of 304 or whatever doesn’t seem relevant to anything right now.
He’s a fucking Nazi who is the shadow president right now and is causing chaos throughout the federal government.
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This hypothesis seems indistinguishable from Elon being a con man who people start to see through once they see him wrecking the government.
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The important factor is the ability to sell. To sell products, or sell a vision to your people, or sell investment pitches, just being able to win people over to your point of view and then close. Being good at bullshit is one way to be good at sales but not the only way. Like Steven Jobs was also an amazing salesman and wasn’t a bullshitter
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Most people think he invented the smartphone.
Kinda like how most people think Elon invented the electric car.
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