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I am reminded of how my then-preteen sister played Hearts against our card shark uncle (who paid his way through college by winning at cards!!!) and won, merely by being so unpredictable in terms of strategy that he could not figure out what she had.

Hubris and money generates an immense amount of societal momentum - authenticity and genuine expertise less so (sadly)

yup, because people these days don't have the attention span for genuine expertise and authenticity. It's all about the dopamine, which is why hype merchants like Musk continue to have ridiculous pull in excess of their personal capacity for charisma.

The first thing I wonder is, do we have records of all of his bets? Or just the ones that paid off? But even if we do, and his success to failure ratio is unusually high, all he needed was to beat the odds once. Once you have infinite money, success can be purchased. Exactly like the "all in" story.

Elon was born at the 5-yard line and everything since Zip2 has been nothing but him dancing in the endzone. This anecdote doesn’t fully examine the phenomena at play here, it’s just meant to heighten the myth of the man and of entrepreneurs in general.

I don't deny that at all. The story is a demonstration of how you can be incredibly stupid and get away with it if you have infinite funds. But that's really not the point I was going for.

And, if you look at his career, he's definitely gone "all in" repeatedly, and come out the winner multiple times. To an odds-defying degree. This reminds me of the lovely opening scene in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, regarding the coin flips. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOwL...

The probability of continued success going all in so often seems impossible, but it *can* happen. The probability isn't zero, it's just extremely unlikely. And at some point, as in R&GaD one might lose the suspense of it, and just assume it's always going to work out. It defies... something.

But, so long as it keeps happening, there must be some reason (as Tim Roth's character posits in the film). In Elon's case, he and many of his fans, insist that it's that he's so smart/capable. But there's also the possibility (as in the film) of just dumb luck.

Before I knew he was a reply-guy, and on the worst side of seemingly every issue, audacity was one of his admirable qualities. How many kids dreamt of going to Mars? How many have put a sequence of events into play to make it plausible? But there’s a fine line between audacity and recklessness.

He’s only audacious b/c he can afford to be. The idea that these startup founders are all MENSA level geniuses is borne out of ignorance of how startups and venture capital work. For instance, most people don’t know that founders are given early access to liquidity that other early employees don’t.

And sometimes this comes at the expense of the health of the startup. So in actuality, founders don’t really risk all that much, and if the startup fails, they often remain wealthy and can ply the proceeds into new ventures.