LogFAQs > #979367810

OhhhJa posted...

So you don't think successful business magnates can be hyper intelligent?

"Can be"? Sure - I never said they couldn't be hyper-intelligent, I said there's no correlation between high levels of intelligence and the ultra-wealthy (if I wanted to say that ultra-wealthy are seldom or never hyper-intelligent, I would have said those two traits are negatively correlated).

The traits generally correlated with billionaires are high starting wealth, high degrees of risk-tolerance, greed, and a certain level of narcissism and/or psychopathy. None of those require above-average intelligence.

OhhhJa posted...

It's a different type of intelligence from what it requires to be a scientist or academic, but I don't think it's fair to make the qualifier for not being intelligent "not being a scientist" lol

I'm referring to the general definition of intelligence, which is someone who can learn, understand, retain, and formulate complex concepts and ideas quickly.

I know much ink has been spilled in the last couple of decades about "different forms of intelligence"; bluntly, I don't know how much I agree with that movement, because a lot of it smacks of trying to shoehorn the phrase "intelligence" into various different definitions - of sometimes questionable veracity - as a balm to the ego of those who don't meet the "classical" definition of intelligence. That said, it's mostly an issue of semantics; I know multiple people who never finished high school but are master craftsmen who can make works of art with their hands (and everyone on the planet knows an athlete who is dumb as a brick but who earns more in a year than most of us will in a career for their talent at their sport of choice) - I generally call that "skill" rather than "intelligence", but it's different names for the same concept, so call it what you will.

OhhhJa posted...

That said I don't think high intellect is a very big factor in becoming a .001%. By far the most common denominator between the mega rich people is being born into generational wealth

And on that, we are absolutely in agreement.

ZayKayWill posted...

Apparently there are some people speculating that he doesn't even know how to program or engineer stuff and that the people he hired are the ones doing all that?

If that's true, my question is how someone would even fucking know that without knowing him personally.

Do you think no one knows Musk personally? The dude gets very involved in running his businesses. There are plenty of anecdotes about him from those who have worked with him that suggest he has no fucking clue what he's doing. To pick one example, one of the stories that came out of Tesla claimed that at least one of the workers had a "Musk script", which would just open up a window and spit out lines of fast-moving, meaningless text, Matrix-style, because Musk thought that was what coding was supposed to look like and he would get angry at people for "not working" if what they were doing didn't look like how he thought it should.

I can't personally speak to his competency when it comes to coding (because my own coding skill is extremely rudimentary, so I largely would have no idea as to whether his opinions are valid or not) or engineering (I am an engineer, but I've never heard any technical statements from Musk on engineering that I could evaluate, and even if I did, I'm not a mechanical/automotive engineer, so there's a good chance I wouldn't have the expertise to make a proper evaluation if he's talking about cars specifically), but others in those fields have pointed out issues with things that he's said that certainly makes me question his intelligence.

ZayKayWill posted...

If he really was as stupid as people make him out to be, why not replace him with someone who could actually do the job better?

And how would they do that?

Those who work for Musk don't have the capability to replace him, and those who could (i.e. shareholders at his publicly traded companies) would face an uphill battle (he owns a sizable chunk of stock in all of the companies he has that are publicly traded, which limits the capability of other shareholders to force him out by requiring their vote to be near-unanimous) and also largely don't care about his personal competency so long as he keeps making them money.

Notably, he did get fired from his first gig as a CEO - of Paypal - for what amounted to incompetence at running it as a proper business.