Why Is Elon Musk Such A Failure As A Human Being?

How an obese spoiled rich kid became a champion of the ultra-far-right

Apparently being an “alpha male” doesn’t take much these days. Image credit: The Sun

There are a great many people who make the mistake of imagining that because someone has accumulated a lot of money this implies they are intelligent. In reality, every study conducted on the topic of entrepreneurial success reveals two important factors, neither of which are in any way connected to intelligence. The first important factor is that the entrepreneur comes from a wealthy, or at least very comfortably well-off family. Without exception, every tech billionaire ticks this box. The second important factor is luck. It’s actually surprising how large a role luck plays.

Musk’s life confirms the importance of the two key elements. His family is rich, enjoying the proceeds of the emerald mine they own in which Africans toil for extremely low wages. And Musk has been very lucky — his own startup bombed but was acquired at the last moment by the company that ultimately became PayPal. Although Musk was booted out of the CEO role after only a few months because he wasn’t competent, he retained his shares and those shares are what enabled his later career.

Musk invested in Tesla after the hard work (the management of the charge/discharge cycle and how to cool so many batteries wired together) had already been accomplished; later Musk effectively cheated the two co-founders out of the bulk of the value they’d created. To be fair to Musk, he did make one important contribution to Tesla: he realized that going down the Nissan Leaf route would be a mistake. Pushing the company to make the Roadster so as to break the stigma of electric cars (slow, boring, something only masochistic vegans would buy) was a great marketing move. But everything else has been the work of other people. Musk’s “big idea” to make the Tesla assembly plant almost entirely robotic backfired in a big way and nearly killed the company — all because Musk thought he didn’t need to learn the details of automobile manufacturing, which to him were boring.

He’s a genius, so why bother to learn anything when you’re so smart you already know it all?

And the same trick of riding on other people’s backs is equally true of SpaceX. While Musk likes to posture and preen…