Why Elon Musk is a broken human being, or why billionaires are so often overconfident jerks who suck [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

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Brian Klaas
If you’re interested in why Elon Musk is a broken human being, or why billionaires are so often overconfident jerks who suck, well, I’ve helpfully written three essays to explain it. Here they are:

The Myth of the Secret Genius

If he’s super rich, he must be a super genius.

That conclusion is a cognitive mistake many continue to make when they encounter a seemingly incongruous state of affairs, such as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, behaving like an irrational idiot. And yet, behave like an idiot he does, day after day, a public jester who can buy the world’s most expensive jewels or light $44 billion on fire, but hasn’t yet found a shop to sell him self-awareness or common sense.

Elon Musk is part of a small class of extremely rich people who are rich partly because they’re effective at making others think they’re Secret Geniuses.

Other alleged Secret Geniuses are constantly in the news these days: Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos (heading to prison); Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX (probably heading to prison); Adam Neumann of WeWork (who produced a spectacular financial collapse); and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (who has, so far, poured $30 billion into a metaverse that looks like a PlayStation 2 game from 2001).

/snip