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Scott Alexander’s review of a 2015 biography of Elon Musk. Elon Musk, to me, is one of the world’s most confusing people. He’s simultaneously both one of the smartest people in the world, creating billions of dollars of value in companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and one of the dumbest, in burning billions on Twitter. Scott’s review I think is a good explanation of what’s up with Musk.
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Notes -
On twitter I have seen the likes of Cernovich and others claim Elon is among the smartest people on earth, if not the smartest. He's smart, no doubt, but to be among the smartest would put him in the company of Fields Medalists, math Olympiad and Putnam winners, math and physics doctorates, etc. Possible but very improbable, imho. He's smart but not that smart. He benefited from luck and good business savvy and intuition about markets, all necessary ingredients for business success. The Twitter Blue verification system did not stop spam, as I and others correctly predicted (when scammers can make $1000s in a day , how is $8 a deterrent). Maybe he was not smart enough to see that, or he did not care.
Musk actually did (very briefly) start a PhD in materials science at Stanford before dropping out to start his first start-up. So I'm not sure "he's not a physics doctorate" is a convincing argument that he's not smart. However, I do basically agree with you: Musk is not a genius, but he is probably still very smart and also has other unusual skills (Scott's book review refers to his high level of intensity, focus and work ethic). More generally, I suspect that many of the most successful people in business are not quite the very smartest people. Intelligence is correlated with other useful traits like conscientiousness, but not perfectly so, and to succeed at the very highest level in business, those other traits also matter a lot.
Musk's success is evidence that beyond a certain threshold of IQ, almost anything is possible .
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