[hourago]

> It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways.

EVERYBODY is "incredibly talented and smart in some ways".

[monkeywork]

sadly no they aren't... thus the word "incredibly" -> "to a great degree; extremely or unusually."

Most people are average, many are below average.

[reaperman]

This falls under the "curse of dimensionality"[0]. There are so many tasks/patterns/parts of life that humans can develop specialized skills in that most humans (nearly every human?) are exceptional at something. It might be "identifying the best cardboard scraps and arranging it to make a bed on the sidewalk which is optimally comfortable", or "knowing how to make one specific family member smile" but it'll be something.

If you were to enumerate every skill that improves the life of at least one human, there are probably more than 10 billion such skills which require complex analysis, deep experience, and aptitude to execute at a high level. That's enough for everyone to have something they're "best" at.

One of my favorite quotes is: "If you judge a dolphin by its ability to fly, you are the idiot."

If you're speaking of "generalized intelligence", i.e. some metric which collapses the dimensionality to just a few axes, then obviously you start seeing a more classic distribution where many people are "dumber" than you. But you'd still lack many, many life skills necessary to comfortably take over their life were you to magically swap places with them.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality

[pessimizer]

The average person knows orders of magnitude more about many subjects than you do. Average doesn't mean that you're half-good at everything.

[lyu07282]

liberals talking about billionaires always gives me a brain aneurysm, but regardless I'd just like to point out that whatever talent and intelligence Musk possesses in your minds, is very inconsequential in comparison to his families wealth through ownership of an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa.