I get two things out of this article: 1) Elon's tremendous luck. He took huge gambles, repeatedly, and they all turned up heads. They were all very worthy ambi

I get two things out of this article: 1) Elon's tremendous luck. He took huge gambles, repeatedly, and they all turned up heads. They were all very worthy ambitions, but nine times out of ten, they would not have worked out. I don't condemn him for taking those risks at all (in fact I applaud it), but: There are probably plenty of entrepreneurs out there with comparable intelligence or ambition, but when they fall on their faces, we just shake our heads at them and say "well, that's what you get". But each of them simply wasn't lucky enough to have an Elon story. We should keep this in mind either while heaping adoration on Musk or while rationalizing someone else's failure. 2) Elon almost didn't succeed on more than one occasion because somebody else was actively trying to screw him over. And that (human shittiness) is one of the stochastic forces that made his success so unlikely. The world would have been a worse place and civilization would have been set back, all by the selfish behavior of some VC company. It is reprehensible that lollipop-yanking and sandcastle-stomping is not only actively impeding our society's progress, but despite this, it is actually tolerated or even revered.