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It's also just absolutely pathetic to go through life with such smug pride in talent level that hasn't actually been expressed with any particular accomplishments to be proud of. Gloating about having a higher IQ or more academic credentials than Musk is the equivalent of someone saying they have a higher VO2max than the Tour de France champion. OK, good for you when you look at the number on your phone, but Tadej Pogacar is a multimillionaire cycling champion with a beautiful girlfriend and you're proud that you can consume a lot of oxygen. I don't even like Musk, but he's obviously just done more than almost every single human being alive.
When you're used to discounting building companies because that requires investment of money and/or people being willing to follow you (as opposed to personal physical/mental labor), this is not obvious. The intuitive response to "look at how much Musk built" is "he didn't build all 'at".
How many of the projects he's working on would exist without him? Yeah, the natural resources and people would still exist and presumably be put towards some kind of productive goal but consider the positive and negative effects of his competitors on the world. On the one end, you have things that are objectively bad like gambling. I would say Elon's current projects are pretty close to the polar opposite; that is to say, objectively good. Curing paralysis, colonizing the solar system, the HUGE push towards making electric vehicles the norm and more recently, major advances in AI.
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And that’s just silly. Building companies are crazy hard. Which is why it is so well remunerated. Musk shows an almost unparalleled ability to build companies.
Ehhhhhh. Building companies is hard, and building companies is well remunerated, but being hard is not why building companies is well remunerated.
Building companies is well remunerated because capital enjoys systemic leverage over labour and is able to claim more of the rewards from their cooperation for itself. When capital and labour work together both parties are better off (otherwise they wouldn't do it), but capital gets more of the reward because unemployed capital is much less miserable than unemployed labour. So the worker is paid in wages, while the investor is paid in profits.
If building companies was easy, then there would be a lot more people doing it. If there were a lot more people doing it, then the labor they provide (ie in the form of equity) would be much smaller compared to the amount of equity that capital takes.
Market history suggests the dear thing isn’t capital but skill in building large scalable companies. Capital is common and cheap in comparison.
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Completely, I don’t think it’s really a useful way of ranking yourself or others. Still, I wouldn’t take lessons on macroeconomics from Musk, whereas I might read what Scott has to say, even if he’s wrong, because he’s smarter.
Is he smarter? Are you sure? Scott has said some really dumb things. Hasn’t really accomplished a lot outside of becoming somewhat internet famous.
Tons of smart people believe very dumb things, certainly if you’re a conservative (most of the very smartest people in the west are pretty mainstream neolibs). I think Scott is pretty smart based on his writing ability and skill at synthesising information in his reviews etc, which I think correlates highly with intelligence.
But that doesn’t mean “he is smarter than Musk.”
Sure building a company isn’t solely based on IQ. But building technically difficult companies across multiple domains suggests some pretty strong intelligence, especially compared to someone who is basically a glorified essayist.
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Do you realize that Elon Musk has absolute domain expertise in several, unrelated engineering disciplines (aerospace, rocket engine design, electric vehicle design and integration, and manufacturing for all of these), and that before he got started in his current arc he had domain expertise in several other unrelated engineering and regulatory disciples (software and banking regulation)?
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