> Elon Musk is not a genius. He passes off the work of others as his own, he treats his employees like garbage, and he has the impulse control of a teenager. O

> Elon Musk is not a genius. He passes off the work of others as his own, he treats his employees like garbage, and he has the impulse control of a teenager. Ok, Elon Musk is not a genius. And he definitely has the impulse control of a teenager, or of a teenager with impulse control issues. He may treat his employees like garbage (although probably not all of them, I hear he took about 50 Tesla engineers to Twitter's headquarters to check their code, those guys are probably well treated). But he does things that other people don't. Most other people would have been happy with Tesla at the Roadster stage. Luxury sports cars, in small volumes but large margin. Just like Koenigsegg or Lotus. Why risk a bird in hand for two in the bush? Because he's driven. He's not content. He's willing to bet the house. People who know how to take calculated risks get rich. People who are unwilling to take risks find this unfair. And they complain those who get rich are not anything special, they just happen to be luckier, or they exploit the work of their employees, or other stuff like that. Silly things like out of 1000 people who flip coins 1 will flip ten heads in a row by pure luck, but will claim he has a special talent to flip head (after the fact). Musk, and other people like him, are not coin-flippers. Well, Sam Bankman Fried is. But Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, those are not coin flippers. They have lots of qualities that people who are not close to them find easy to discount. They are not in the top richest club by pure chance. In a parallel life, they could have been less successful, but they would have been maga-millionaires too.