Atlas shrugged twitter

Yesterday, Elon Musk made a wonderful [proposal] on how to equip Ukraine for the world. It implies that it is necessary to: hold referendums under the supervision of the UN in the South and East of Ukraine, recognize Crimea as Russian (because "it was formally Russian from 1783 until Khrushchev's mistake"), provide water for Crimea and guarantee the "neutral status" of Ukraine . Of course, some Ukrainians have already declared Musk a Kremlin agent (for nothing that he supplies them with Starlink). Although it seems that in reality he sincerely tried to offer a "Solomonic solution", having previously devoted 5 minutes to studying Wikipedia and 10 minutes to talking with Professor Peterson.

In fact, Musk is a good example of why the "super rich and successful" should not be idealized and romanticized. Twitter should have been invented if only so that such people could communicate directly with the public, without the ennobling filter of PR and press secretaries. And everyone would have seen what they really have in mind - nothing that would differ from the thoughts of an ordinary sofa expert. But at the same time, we intuitively expect that market success is fraught with some kind of meritocracy, and we are surprised when the super-rich people give out completely ordinary judgments. How can you be so rich and so stupid? But the bottom line is that our expectations are wrong: the market is not a measure of human qualities, but only an effective system for transmitting information. Market prices are a signal of human needs and at the same time a motivation for action. Whoever satisfies these needs faster and more efficiently will earn. But will he be a "better man"? Far from it. He may simply be in the right place at the right time, have capital in the form of an inheritance, and so on. When it comes to new technologies, there are no formed needs at all - they need to be "guessed" by reconnaissance in force. And this is often a matter of pure luck. A successful entrepreneur-innovator is often a person who becomes such not at all from a great mind, but vice versa - because he does not assess risks well and overestimates himself. One in a thousand manages to stumble upon a goldmine, and then the public evaluates him according to the principle of "survivor's error".

Of course, there are certain threshold conditions without which success is impossible - for example, success does not accompany gouging who are not capable of regular work, or cowards who do not want to take risks at all. However, among equally hardworking entrepreneurs, the one who has found the right connections can take off to Olympus, among equally risky startups - the one who is lucky. But the virtue of reflection often does not accompany such people - it is more comfortable for them to believe in their own exclusivity than to accept the factor of fortune in their lives. I remember seeing a study that the rich tend to overestimate themselves in such matters as "the ability to stay unharmed by jumping from the second floor." Alas, I can’t find it, but here, for example, is a study on how the rich overestimate their knowledge in mathematics. In general, the bottom line is that having felt the taste of success on the lips, a person begins to imagine himself an expert in everything and give out a valuable opinion without the slightest preparation. In the case of Musk, this is exacerbated by the fact that he likes to go against the establishment (“to spite Biden, I will get frostbite in my ears”).

In general, you just don't look into the mouth of people like Musk and expect that their outstanding market success somehow correlates with their qualities. It just doesn't correlate.

Mihail Pojarsky 04/10/2022