I think I found this more interesting than the original biography review by Scott. There is a lot of distilled wisdom in these posts.
However, there is one area that always rubs me the wrong way. It is smart people who don't know dumb people talking about intelligence.
Where I am now in life I interact almost exclusively with smart people. Not just high IQ wiz kids with no experience. But people that have both the raw brain power, and the life experience to be sharp and wicked smaht. I'm in a rich neighborhood, and wealth has a noticeable correlation with IQ. I currently work for an institution that employs academics who must explain their work to the media (so they can't just sit in an ivory tower and write illegible crap). I use to work at a tech company that for quite a few years basically gave people an IQ test before they could join, and they were willing to fire people who didn't work out (the selection effects weren't perfect but they were certainly noticeable). My college friends were mostly from an "honors" section that got scholarships and accolades for academic achievements.
This was not always the case.
I went to highschool in a nice-ish area. The highschool was pretty decent for where I lived, but it still had noticeable rates of teenage pregnancy, drunk driving fatalities, minor gang fights (no more than temporary hospitalizations), about a fifth of the school below the poverty line, and a racial mix that actually came pretty close to matching America's general racial mix.
This highschool had dumb-dumbs. Probably something close to an average amount of dumb-dumbs. But at the time it was painful how many of them there were. I am smart for the general population, but a bit of a dumb-dumb when I get into smart people circles. 95th percentile on SATs. 1 in 20 seems only ok, but in a random class of ~30 kids I was likely to be the smartest or 2nd smartest. And its not the academic under performance that ever bothered me. I wasn't in any position to judge, I did well on standardized tests, but I was solidly a B student at best. Most of the material seemed dumb and stupid. We were all often doing equally bad at it. It was the everything else that bothered me about interacting with chronically stupid people.
I often heard people brag growing up that they were "street smart" while some academic achiever was "book-smart". This gave me the false impression that there were two kinds of people out there and there was just a trade off between the two. That was badly wrong. Some people are just dumb. They can fail to learn how to read, and fail at not walking into oncoming traffic, and fail at not picking a fight with a group of kids that will kick their ass. There are people that just seem to make repeatedly bad decisions in all areas of their life. I grew to hate these people, because loving and caring about them was too painful. To watch them make terrible decisions again and again, no matter how you advise them, no matter how much you try its like they seem determined to make their own lives a living hell by refusing to understand the world around them.
Bringing this back around to Elon Musk:
Yes he is smart. He is very smart. If he doesn't seem that smart compared to the people around you, then congratulations you live in a smart person bubble. I live in one too, its great! No one is ever making terrible decisions that might casually endanger me. No one is starting physical fights, because words hurt their brain too much. They know all the latest social norms, and when to violate the silly ones to make a joke. I can have deep conversations with them about nearly any topic, they might not know the details, but if I make it interesting they will pick it up and participate. The people around me know how to manage their money, so they aren't ever begging me for handouts, or trying to nickle and dime me on shared expenses.
The phrase "check your privilege" comes to mind, but the tone that people normally use feels very wrong. Just imagine me saying it in the same way a surfer says "kowabunga dude!" while offering a high five.
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Notes -
I think his IQ points to 135-140 based on test scores. I think he had a few advantages
Being from S Africa. People with broken homes who end up far away just have more energy. They are more about taking risks and accomplishments. Maybe rich people from Greenwich have this just as often and it’s just a filter.
He networked into some good situations and found the PayPal mafia. Not sure if that’s luck or skill. But certainly some path dependency.
He has some kind of “mule” like ability. Maybe it’s autism but it seems like he lacks some of the internal fears most of us have that blocks us. He also probably should be in jail. I think the “420” tweets heavily violated securities law. I guess he had enough accomplishments to get a get out of jail free card.
it was not just luck and networking. he created Zip2 in 1995 and then x .com in 1999, which in 2000 merged with Confinity. Thiel was voted as CEO and Musk ousted (which is why there has always been a bitter rivalry between the two individuals) , and changed its name to PayPal in 2001. He had the skills and had built a reputation having already created two companies before getting involved with PayPal.
It's not a matter of thinking they did. they actually did https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-219
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Yeah, re. 3 the government (including the Biden administration, despite their political differences) obviously gives Musk a huge pass and favorable treatment because both NASA and the Ukraine war effort rely on him.
Musk openly mocks the president, retweets Tucker and Fox stuff, sometimes hardcore far right stuff, retweets Biden senility posts, and all people in the administration do is occasionally say his comments were unwise or possibly ill informed. He’s actually achieved an impressive amount of power over the federal government because the $100bn prestige program to return to the moon and the $100bn Ukraine war effort are both reliant upon him.
I think this calls into question the power of the left. The left are assumed to be this big, monolithic organization than can bring down anyone or anything, but except for small targets like Jan 6th protestors, is limited. The Fed. government would love to be able to do something about Musk, but cannot do much . he is under fed. investigation but I don't think much will come of it https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/doj-investigates-elon-musk-perks-at-tesla/
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Back when he did taking Tesla private for 420 that is I believe a huge security law violation and he was only Tesla for most part.
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