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I'm not American so any specific figure hidden in the deep woods is likely to escape my current notice. I will state that I do pay attention to track records as evidence for total success, and mere participation in one successful project doesn't make up for historical failures. Musk powered through to get Space X and Tesla working despite immense (and to my mind still extant) disadvantages, and X is a flailing shitpile (along with Optimus, Hyperloop, The Boring Company, Neuralink and other stupid ass ideas). Thiel and Vance are SV VC who have culture war trappings drawing eyeballs to them and their decent-but-not-especially-outsize performance. @SlowBoy is right in saying that Musk beat Boeing and NASA with SpaceX, but that highlights the incapability of Boeing more than anything else, and Thiel is... like, he founded PayPal. Great investor/manager maybe, not exactly genius planetbrain.
My gut is basically 'when this man speaks does his rambling pass the smell test'. I'm too old and lazy to hyperoptimize and backtrace, so just based on gut for recent supposed smartdicks I've seen interviewed on whatever shitty clip floats to my attention. The following logarithmic scale is my assessment of smartdickiness, with 0/10 being College Educated Corporate Professional With 10 Years Of Experience And Steady Career Profession With No Fuckups. The modal mottizen is probably a 3-5/10 on this smartdick scale. A 10/10 galaxybrain is I dunno, a combination of Nikola Tesla, the Black Scholes dudes, Grace Hopper, and lets throw in Billy Beane and Michael Jackson (americentric references due to availability and common reference pools).
If forced to choose the closest I'd rank as a modern singular smartdick I'll demurr and give the following options (weighted for visibility and common knowledge osmosis),
Chase CEO Jamie Dimon 7/10
Berkshire chancellor Charlie Munger: soft 7.5 (or 8)/10
Stephen Cohen (the one I think actually has the sauce instead of Thiel) firm 8/10
(sigh) Steve Jobs: 8.5/10. The man had the product design and pivoting flexibility to drive the change we see in modern microcomputing. Theres a reason every SV blowhard wants to copy his style.
For reference I'd rank the 3 i cited as follows: Vance 5-6.5/10 Musk 6.5-7.5/10 Thiel 7-7.5/10
I do not think Musk Vance and Thiel are stupid at all, they clearly are smart enough to avoid crippling fuckups and have pushed appropriately for given opportunities. However I do think that current conservative fluffing of these particular smartdicks is to contrast them against the cucked college educated cowards abasing themselves to performative wokeness. The motivated reasoning to claim that these men are Truly Intelligent comports their actual achievements into parody. We fete these men as kings among sheep because they dare to stand against the intelligensia, even if their crown ill fits.
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