Brilliant !
Clever people can be really fucking stupid, can’t they…
Should I feel reassured, or merely afraid?
Einstein would have had some wise words for this situation, I suspect.
Musk, you are the thickest genius ever.
Fact.
Thank you for making me feel better about being bang average.
The thing is, he’s not genius. I’m not sure how that idea ever developed. People think he invents stuff, but in reality, he’s just a greedy little prick, who used family money to leverage borrowing against investments, made a lot of money, and bought into clever inventions other people had come up with. Which he then milks for every penny they are worth so that he can do more of the same
He’s never created or invented anything. He’s just another rich asshole.
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Hmmm.
Of all the things that trouble me about Musk, I’ve never questioned his intelligence. The evidence in support of that does look pretty robust.
I do, however, question the ‘he’s remarkably human for such a smart bloke’ angle, which is starting to fray around the edges more than a tad.
He’s far from stupid but in terms of his actual achievements I’d agree with you that he’s intelligent and also with @shrink that he’s not genius. Genius is rare. He has bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Physics from U of Pennsylvania. UPenn is a good school - Ivy League - but it’s not MIT or Stanford. Musk did go to Calfornia to attend Stanford but never enrolled for classes.
He was smart enough to found two businesses - a city guide software company which Compaq paid $300M for and an internet bank which subsequently merged with another company to become PayPal and which eBay then paid $1.5B for.
After the first success it’s hard to see how much Musk has actually contributed to anything that his money has enabled since. Once you have a nine-digit sum in the bank you can use it to get other people’s smart ideas off the ground. You just need to pick enough winners and at least some of that can be down to chance.
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He got lucky and made a lot of money. Now he’s fallen into the trap of believing his own bullshit.
His primary skill is marketing not engineering.
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Did you ever read the exposes about Tesla and Space X?
Tesla was mostly about the incredibly stupid ways he was a dick to staff - things like insisting on removal of legally mandate safety colour schemes because he didn’t like the look. Space X was more interesting, they basically brought him in to fund raise (one of the things he’s actually good at is personal brand management for himself). But they’ve also put quite a lot of time and effort into making sure no “ideas” he has get anywhere near a rocket.
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He didn’t though. He was a coder and the city guide company was the idea of Greg Kouri who was a real estate agent in Canada, he came up with the idea and the business model.
He was sacked as CEO of X and it was only under a different CEO that they were successful and inherited Paypal via a merger. He wasn’t even CEO when they renamed the company as Paypal and it grew.
His preference for Microsoft- over Unix-based software caused a rift among the company’s employees, and eventually led Confinity co-founder Peter Thiel to resign.[70]With the company suffering from compounding technological issues and the lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000.[[71]]
Choosing MS over Unix in 2000 would have been an utterly crazy idea for a financial company as it would have been NT and had nowhere near the same ability as Unix to handle multi-tasking and complex workloads.
@coco is spot on, he has been nothing more than lucky with his dad’s and then other’s money.
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Also, how shit do you have to be that Peter Thiel is considered a better alternative.
It’s positively incestuous really when you realise just how much Thiel is the power behind the throne of JD Vance.
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All I see his skills as being are bullshitting and throwing shapes.
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Yes, like I said, marketing. 
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Well you don’t want the toxic twat anywhere near actual design and engineering of stuff so I guess marketing is probably the ‘safest’ place you can let this meth head play being the boss.
Quite. In many ways he’s like a Nazi version of Steve Jobs.
“But it was a Roman salute dammit…”
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In the same manner that the swastika is an ancient peace symbol.
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lol
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Yeah, I saw that and it made me lol. “Pet Marco Rubio” 