The article is talking about ongoing changes in what skills are most valuable. Bill Gates got super-rich by running Microsoft from 1975 to 2000. There's no inco

The article is talking about ongoing changes in what skills are most valuable. Bill Gates got super-rich by running Microsoft from 1975 to 2000. There's no inconsistency between "hard tech skills were most valuable 15-40 years ago" and "people skills are going to be most valuable over the next 20 years". And I think you may be mixing up two things that could be meant by phrases like "people person". It could be that being nice isn't very effective in bringing dramatic success, but that *understanding people and being able to manipulate them" is. (And ... very, very few people are Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Even if your goal is to get rich, you probably do better by asking "how can I get into the top 0.1% of the population by wealth" than by asking "how can I get into the top 10 of the population by wealth", and the answers to those might be quite different.)