Flip a coin enough times and you'll get a run of all heads that is arbitrarily long. Doesn't change the fact that nothing but randomness is at work. Musk works

Flip a coin enough times and you'll get a run of all heads that is arbitrarily long. Doesn't change the fact that nothing but randomness is at work. Musk works hard, no doubt. But that is a necessary, not a sufficent, condition for success. Many people have worked just as hard as Musk and failed. Furthermore, successful people who start second businesses tend to fail slightly more often than first-timers, which is hard to understand if you believe business success is a learnable skill. So I don't think Musk is a counter-example to the OP's point, but rather a predictable consequence. In a world were 95% of startups fail and tens of thousands of people start companies, you'd expect the odd one to have multiple successes. Again: this does not mean that Musk isn't incredibly smart, hard-working and most of all courageous. It means he's all of that, and lucky as well. Every successful entrepreneur is going to be hard working etc, but that says nothing about all the hard working entrepreneurs who aren't successful (I'm belabouring this point because in this kind of discussion one often sees "All the successful people I know are hard-working" as if that had anything at all to do with the claim "All hardworking people are successful."