The billionaire cult is slowly dismantling itself. I came to adulthood in the early 2000s and I remember the presumption basically being that they must be very

The billionaire cult is slowly dismantling itself. I came to adulthood in the early 2000s and I remember the presumption basically being that they must be very smart because they're very rich and if they're very smart about the thing that made them very rich then they must be very smart about everything else as well. There are cases where that has borne out. It's hard to argue that Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos aren't shrewd businesspeople who know how to use the levers of power to get what they want. But as a counterargument against that is Elon Musk, supposedly based on the mythos of the capitalist meritocracy the greatest among us (because, if not, how could he have become the richest?) who has revealed himself to be cruel, petty, awkward, desperate and has very publicly mismanaged several companies to the point of being sued by shareholders who've found his behavior to be so detrimental to the value of their holdings that it's inseparable from malice. A lot of people are realizing that it's a crap shoot. Being smart is certainly an advantage, but it's one of many and being rich or having access to powerful people seem to be just as influential. One of the most revealing things about Musk came from Walter Isaacson's biography on him. According to the book, Musk once joined a poker game at a table full of card sharps, odds savants and the kind of people you expect would play a lot of poker and would also eat alive anyone who wasn't on their level. He bulldozed them. His strategy? Bet everything he has on every hand and, when he loses, just buy more chips. Isaacson seems to think this proves Musk to be an outside-the-box-thinking risk-taker but there's another, less generous interpretation: capitalism tends to elevate those who have enough resources that they can get their asses kicked 10 times and still come back for an 11th, but the odds are against you if you're playing with all you have no matter how gifted a player you actually are.