If someone wins the lottery, does that mean "they're a genius at picking numbers?" How many people with musk's starting wealth have started businesses? Do you think every single one of them is less of a genius than he is?
Musk's success story is just anecdata, as almost all wealth stories are.
If someone wins the lottery 4 different times buying only like 10 tickets in their whole life, you better fucking believe something special is going on there.
>How many people with musk's starting wealth have started businesses? Do you think every single one of them is less of a genius than he is?
Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.
Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No. Each one was built off the previous success. Without paypal there is no tesla (or at least not involving him). Without tesla there is no spacex. These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.
And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him. We can't test the counterfactual. His success is only evident in hindsight and the only proof that it's somehow unique to him is the fact that it happened.
> Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.
The claim here is that Musk is uniquely intelligent and that somehow explains his outsized success. That implies the people who don't have his success are not as smart as he is.
Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.
If someone wins the lottery repeatedly (Zip2, X.com/Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company) I'd entertain the possibility that they weren't just 'picking numbers'.
Without commenting on the others, the Wikipedia article for Neuralink seems to say it’s taken a ton of funding but failed to make any big improvements in the science or technology, and without even reaching initial human trials. The Boring Company built “a single-lane underground roadway less than a mile long, driven by conventional Tesla automobiles, constructed at a total cost of $48 million” (see the Wikipedia article for it).
I don’t see how either of those can be considered winning the lottery, to use your phrase.
Winning the lottery once increases your ability to win it in the future because you can (if you want) buy more tickets. Success creates conditions for more success in pretty mundane ways.
only Paypal & SpaceX though, the rest may fail, Neuralink & The Boring Company are merely hype at this point. Tesla will face a lot of competition in years to come and now it has no novelty factor.
kortilla|3 years ago
>How many people with musk's starting wealth have started businesses? Do you think every single one of them is less of a genius than he is?
Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.
stormbrew|3 years ago
Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No. Each one was built off the previous success. Without paypal there is no tesla (or at least not involving him). Without tesla there is no spacex. These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.
And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him. We can't test the counterfactual. His success is only evident in hindsight and the only proof that it's somehow unique to him is the fact that it happened.
> Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.
The claim here is that Musk is uniquely intelligent and that somehow explains his outsized success. That implies the people who don't have his success are not as smart as he is.
Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.
ckw|3 years ago
andrewem|3 years ago
I don’t see how either of those can be considered winning the lottery, to use your phrase.
stormbrew|3 years ago
nsonha|3 years ago