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People overestimate how canny these rich people are versus lucky. Also people who are really smart and good at something are still usually only good at one thing. Many of them are quite happy to hop on the hype train if other hard-nosed business people believe in the project. It's not like any of these people know anything about blood testing, but if Walgreens and Larry Ellison thinks it's the real deal why shouldn't they follow suit?
Also also, SV is overflowing with people flinging money at questionable ideas, the vast majority of which fail. Theranos blew up because it was massive, long-running fraud, not just vaporware. (And biomedical tech fraud has higher stakes than "our productivity software package is shit.")
Nope
This. Larry Ellison is not some genius stock trader who turned a hundred dollar inheritance to 200 billions. Instead, pretty much like Gates, he made his fortune by investing in and leading one software company over decades, and having luck (and competence, and ruthlessness) on his side.
Just because you are in the top percentile of "running a software company", that does not mean that you are some genius stock-picker. Additionally, if the feedback you get from the universe is "on average, your deals are going great, you are one of the richest people alive due to your business decisions", a common side effect of that is overconfidence. Besides, the stock market is probably the only place where Ellison can experience the thrill of gambling, it is not like he can go to Vegas and bet a billion on a single number.
In short, just because someone is very rich that does not mean they are a professional investor, just as someone being very tall does not mean that they are an NBA player.
My world model would be that the people who are actually good at investing are working for Goldman Sachs and the like. If it turned out that they were long on Theranos when it crashed (buying and selling it earlier is fine if you can get away with it, of course), that would be very surprising to me.
Naah, dont make a comparison to Gates.
Gates was insanely intelligent, in that he was intelligent and he was insane. I worked for Microsoft, and personally know people who knew Bill. So these are 1st hand accounts. Dude was insane. He was reading 24x7, while walking, pooping and....driving. (as told to me by someone who was unfortunate enough to sit beside him in his Porsche 911 that he drove while reading at the same time). He was as obsessive as Jobs, and had temper tantrums about 10x of what Jobs was famous for.
Gates' mad-man persona was sanitized through his seasoned veteran image created during his non-profit foundation era. But Bill-Gates was a genius. There are no 2 ways around it.
Ofc, it helped that he was born in a top 0.01 percentile privileged household. He was definitely the first child in Seattle to use a computer.
Perfect trifecta of luck, nepotism and talent.
Your general point is still correct, but I get a sense that Gates legacy gets overlooked because of his deliberate revisionism.
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It’s funny you cite height. Do you know the odds of playing in the nba if you are 7 feet tall or higher? They are multiple orders of magnitude better than if you are below 6 feet tall.
So it is with rich people. Who is a better investor: random GS VP or Peter Thiel?
Funny too because it’s been 20 years since GS was a training ground for investors. They basically closed down all their investing capabilities post Dodd-Frank. Now it’s various forms of professional services. You use to see a bunch of hedge funds come from their ranks but without prop trading those days ended.
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I mean plenty of elite professional traders get blindsided by big macro happenings since they're overfocused on the stock price as a signal. Theranos did never go public (partly due to the fraud involved making it hard to get through audit), though, so limited scope to be traded as well. My professional background is essentially VIP services for Online Casino so I meet a lot of crazy, crazy rich people and I do 100% believe that sheer aggression and compulsive all-inness is probably the most required trait to be superduper rich. It's very hard to snowball into that level of money out of sheer smarts if you have reasonable bankroll management.
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Oh my God.
I know it's said she admired Steve Jobs so much she tried to turn herself into a clone of him with the black turtlenecks, but that is pure Zuckerberg "Hello I am an android" mimicry going on there.
Is everyone in Silicon Valley batshit insane? Does this pass for normal there?
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