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Richard Hanania continues his criticism of Musk, as a guest author for UnHerd. (Sidenote: On his own website, he wrote "I never thought I would write an article for Sohrab Ahmari, as we disagree on a lot and I’ve regrettably insulted him a few times, but he reached out after my recent piece on Musk and asked if I would like to write something for UnHerd.") It's a combination of criticism of Musk as an intellectual, criticism of DOGE, and contrasting the intellectual traits adaptive for business and non-business success. The closing paragraphs are interesting:
Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth. Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever? No. If anything he shot himself in the foot switching from 'I'm a smart tech-right policy guy' to 'let me sneer at all the right-wing retards who are now running the country and are in a position to implement policies'. He's the contrarian rat that jumps on board the sinking ship. What a fool!
Elon may indeed have lost some of his faculties, idk, I've never met the man. I doubt Hanania has either. Armchair psychoanalysis of extremely unusual people is basically just glorified name-calling.
Whatever Elon has lost, if anything, he still makes the rest of the world look like drooling retards. What did I get done in the last 3 years, since 2022? I certainly didn't start an AI company that's outperforming Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I didn't build the biggest datacentre on the planet at record speed.
It's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree with Elon's choices or think he should do something else. I disagree with Elon about many things, including his whole concept of what a state is for. But if people want to go around calling him dumb or saying that his brain 'broke', then we'd better have some serious achievements to prove that we know what 'smart' or 'successful' is! Certainly something better than 'I wrote a book rehashing Mearsheimer (nobody cares about it) and blew up my political career' like Hanania.
Why should anyone care what Hanania thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it? He was pivoting away from Trump while Elon pivoted towards Trump... I think it's clear who has better political skills and like everything else between them, it's an orders of magnitude difference.
This is only relevant if we think that Twitter followers or personal wealth are proportional to intelligence.
There is no doubt some correlation between intelligence and success at one's endeavours. Some. But it is not total, and so if we consider why Hanania isn't fabulously wealthy and followed by a lot of people on the internet, we might consider the very many relevant factors other than intelligence. For instance, Hanania is younger than Musk, Hanania has different personal goals and priorities to Musk, Hanania has a different personality profile to Musk, Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was, and that's all well before we even get to considering luck or arbitrary fortune.
Maybe you think Hanania is dumb anyway, and sure, maybe he is.
But I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people with fewer than Musk's 219 million Twitter followers who you and I would agree are smarter or more reliable guides than Musk. I'm also willing to bet there are lots of people with less net wealth than Musk's 225 billion that you and I would agree are smarter than Musk.
Likewise for other celebrities. Justin Bieber has 109 million Twitter followers and a net worth of around 300 million. That's a lot more than most people. Are you prepared to become a Belieber?
Be serious. Hanania may well be dumb and wrong, but this kind of sneering "he doesn't have as much money as Musk" is worthless.
I understand that this line was not core to your point, but to correct the record - Musk’s family was middle class, turbulent, and abusive. His father’s financial success was very up and down, and he is now completely broke (Musk used to support him, but cut him off after he repeated slept with and attempted to sleep with younger family members.)
Musk arrived in Canada at 17 with $2000 to his name and never received substantial financial support from his family after that. His mom would sometimes send him $100 for groceries. There is no evidence that he ever received a large cash infusion from his parents. Of all the excuses for why Musk is more successful than you, “rich parents” has to be the worst.
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