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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.
I think Elon Musk is smart-but-not-amazingly-smart, and evidence that intelligence is somewhat overrated.
He doesn't have a particularly high success rate on any individual act or decision - he frequently makes mistakes that have to be corrected, or makes himself look stupid by smashing a car window to prove how "indestructible" it is, or bringing a submarine to rescue kids from a cave so tight that a person can barely squeeze through it.
But he does a lot of stuff, and on average it works, and usually he's willing to learn from mistakes.
Sitting around being smart doesn't achieve anything. Going out there and actually doing shit does - even if you screw things up half the time.
His biggest asset is that he's absolutely shameless. Too many people get frozen into inaction because they worry about what other people will think.
It is incredibly rare to be at the center of so many successful companies (paypal, tesla, space x, starlink...). Regardless of his other traits, he's most certainly good at picking winners.
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