>thus the ability to remain in that desirable position implies sufficient competence to fend off all challengers In the modern world there are very few individ

>thus the ability to remain in that desirable position implies sufficient competence to fend off all challengers In the modern world there are very few individual people with a lot of power. Power today is highly distributed among institutions and elites and managers and bureaucrats and so on. Just ask any recent US president when they ran headfirst into the machinery that is the entire government how that went. No deep state necessary, just sheer inertia of systems much larger than them. What all the examples in the article should tell people isn't that powerful people are stupid or smart, it's that nobody's in charge any more. Elon failing to tame twitter, SBF going broke on crypto isn't about intelligence, it's about people trying to speculate on or control systems that are much too complex and autonomous to be ordered around by one guy.