Above all, I AM SICK & TIRED OF billionaires blaming people far less powerful than them! What kind of manly man walks around whining and name-calling and blaming???!!!! WTF!!!!
What's interesting is that any self-help book will tell you that to be more effective you need to quit whining and to quit using other people as excuses. If you believe multi-millionaires and billionaires are in some ways more functional and productive than the rest of us, then you would expect them to be the most self-accountable, like the self-help books say.
Instead, we see several people with elite levels of wealth using the less wealthy as an excuse for their dissatisfaction, playing childish games with name-calling and tribalism, and generally thinking more like dysfunctional people.
Possibilities:
1) It's less about how they actually think and more about how their audience responds. In this light, Musk is like a gangsta rapper or a country music singer, spewing instructions on how to be dysfunctional to an audience which likes exactly that message. They don't have to agree people should live or think in the way advocated by their entertainment - they're just trying to be popular.
2) It is no longer necessary to be functional when one is a rich venture capitalist. You don't have to make carefully considered decisions, cultivate a positive organizational culture, manage people successfully, or reverse course when the results debunk expectations. You have managers and executives employed to do such things for you, and it is impossible for the money to ever run out. With nothing left to do, the world becomes a playground, the people and institutions around you become toys, and the mind is allowed to devolve to a childish and impulsive way of thinking. An increasing level of competency is required to reach the elite levels of business performance until one reaches the point where competency suddenly doesn't matter at all.
3) Selection bias means we only hear from the billionaires or millionaires who are the most viral internet users. Anyone who spends hours on Twitter or whatnot is probably not using their time effectively, per the performance improvement books and common sense. So the people contributing the most content on the social internet are probably the least effective or least self-accountable people. Thus, among the rich and famous, we'll necessarily only see social media posts from the absolute most dysfunctional people in that population. The more functional 99.9% of executives are busy doing more productive things and thinking in a self-accountable way.
You're equating business success with general success.
It's often takes a fucking deranged psyche to become extraordinarily successful in business.
I personally have walked away from business deals that would have made me phenomenally wealthy because I knew they would horribly erode my general quality of life and sense of well being.
I read a great piece that I think I posted about earlier outlining Musk's batshit crazy server move and the deranged reasoning behind it. How his other companies have had to learn from the beginning how to manage him and his maniacal urgency, how to drip feed him information so that he doesn't hear anything as a "no."
To be as successful as Musk, you have to be rather unhinged and have a poor relationship with personal responsibility, otherwise you would have the common sense to listen to smarter people who tell you no.
The judgement error is assuming that this is how to be successful. It isn't, most of the time this type of pathology will lead to failure, but on rare occasions, an absolutely batshit crazy person will strike the exact right combination of bold moves and outperform everyone else because they are incapable of understanding their own limitations and obstacles.
Pair the right kind of crazy with the right kind of clever at the right time in history and you get spectacular results...at least for awhile.
Some of these fucking lunatics learn over time, get humbled, and are forced to refine their perspectives and approaches as the stakes they've created for themselves get bigger: see Bill Gates, a notorious fucking psychopath who learned to play better with others.
Unfortunately, Musk's business success has actually amplified his mental issues and as the stakes get bigger, he's doubling down harder on the more radical aspects of his approach that have worked for him in the past.
Early business success actually selects for fucking deranged folk with mental health issues. Most sane folks aren't willing to go through what the path to major success takes from you, and aren't willing to take the extraordinary risk of failure along the way.
It almost takes a delusional sense of self to even be willing to take such huge bets on oneself, because the chances are that you will not succeed.
As much as there is brilliance and hard work behind success, there is also an enormous element of luck and timing.
One thing that has stood out to me in studying history is that almost all great accomplishments of note in humankind could have easily just been the ramblings of crazy people had the circumstances been a bit different.
You have to understand society's losers to really grasp how many of them are not meaningfully different from society's winners.
It's just that the losers are seen as nuts and the winners are seen as visionaries in retrospect, but A LOT of ideas of the losers were just as plausible as the ideas of the winners.
That's not to say that all crazy folks could be great successes, obviously not. But for every Musk, there's someone just as smart, just as driven, just as creative, just as willing to take insane chances, working with just as much of a clue about what could be accomplished, and who didn't manage to make anything work out and probably lost everything along the way.
And for each of those types, there are more who are just as smart, just as driven, but have the self-preservation instinct to take fewer impossible risks and just live a more normal life of some high accomplishment at a more reasonable scale.
Musk isn't crazy despite being successful, his success is largely a product of him being fucking crazy.
