re: #6 Unabogie

I know we’re not supposed to say this because some people can’t fathom that a rich person didn’t build wealth through smarts and hard work, but Elon Musk is a fucking idiot. There’s no way you solve complex engineering problems without a good bullshit detector. He has none at all. He’s a fucking dolt.

The notion that intelligence in one field translates to general skill in interacting with ideas is just not supportable. Downstream of that, making money does not signify anything about a person’s reasoning about anything but the specific methodology by which they made money…and quite often that amounts knowing how to do sales.

But it’s probably more relevant that believing dubious, untrue, and/or bigoted things is not a product of “intelligence” it’s the result of overconfidence. A rich person can earn money through smarts and hard work and still be generally uninformed…and a bigot…and all their subsequent earnings can be unimpressive feats of salesmanship, precisely because the mythos of their success lifts away from the materiality of that success. In effect, we’re dealing with people that use the Great Man theory of History as a template: it informs them who they are and thus what is permissible.

(this is triple folly: the historiographic notion of “great men” is a retroactive assessment of a person’s role in events that the historian sees as shaping the present, not a D&D class you advance through; “great men” historiography is due criticism for how it flattens complicated events; and the template of “great men” historiography has transformed into a standard form followed by vain people fitting their narrative to the model)

People like Elon Musk have the same values as their critics—that wealth is earned through hard work and smarts—but are running the premise in reverse: I have this much money, therefore I am smart and I work hard. Their subsequent shittiness is built on a series of “…and therefore I get to dictate the terms of reality to everyone else.”

(I don’t want to get stuck in semantics, but the critical disjunction is that you can just re-define “hard work” and “smarts” however is needed once you possess wealth. By stepping over how value is determined, and thus how compensation relates to labor, you can simply point to the money you have to suggest your work is valuable. This is most evident when using the same lens to examine the inverse: people that “work hard” in a very literal sense but are compensated poorly because their roles are devalued.)

It’s not stupidity, it’s hubris, but our culture is more comfortable with the idea that ugly traits are rooted in lack of intelligence than a surplus of confidence. The first is just othering—that person is stupid, not like me, and their repulsive traits are a position that I have no intersection with—the second is one of the most fetishized traits in our culture, to the point that it’s basically the core of an American mysticism: sufficient unwavering belief—confidence—can change reality.

And I think that’s the best way to understand Elon Musk and his ilk: they were never “smart” in that mythologized way that’s common parlance, but when they’re “stupid” it’s directly the product of their overconfidence, and their own acceptance of the myth of genius compounds their folly such that the rest of us have to deal with it.

Elon Musk doesn’t just not-understand the stats he’s quoted, he has no interest in understanding it because his impression is self-validating. He doesn’t care that his lack of understanding is being communicated to his audience leading them to the same error, because the naked fact of his belief is sufficient proof for lesser people.