One conviction I hold very strongly is that "special" people are possibly much more common than we may be lead to believe.
While we are all special in our own way, in this post, "special" refers to having seemingly super-human skills that lead high social standing, being seen as an expert of a field, and generating significant economic, cultural, or scientific impact. Not necessarily the acts you see on America's Got Talent, but the skills that make us think of child prodigy's, famous athletes and artists, leaders, visionaries, geniuses, and overall, people thought to change the world.
This description makes it seem like a high bar, for an exclusive few elites. I'd like to oppose this belief on a few fronts.
Selective Media Attention and Sensationalism: There are probably many more people currently hitting this mark, but don't receive the kind of media coverage that puts them on a mythical pedestal, or even gives general awareness to their prestige. A visibility bias if you will.
Opportunity to Implement: There are probably many people who have these skills, but haven't had a life path enabling them to implement them in a way that lives up to their full potential.
Opportunity to Grow: There are probably many many more people beyond 1. and 2. who may have had the potential to pick up high expertise but did not have a development that nurtured this. How can we maximize people reaching their full potential? Is society well-equipped to hold an interest and incentivize this?
Desire and Hustle Bias: Of all the people who meet some standard of brilliance, how many are interested in producing with their skills? Granted, execution and drive might be part of what we should be considering here. Sometimes the most important thing is that someone went out and did the thing- it doesn't even have to be radically difficult, but it has to be someone driven enough and either has the time or is willing to make the sacrifices.
What we deem Meritful and what we deem Difficult: Already in the intro to this post, I defined "special" as pertaining to a narrow slice of expertise, excluding talents that do not meet the criteria. Notably, certain accomplishments are seen as more valuable than others, for instance a talented singer might gain more accolades than the person with the world record of the highest jump. Additionally, the rareness or perceived difficulty of the accomplishments plays in how we revere someone.
I felt compelled to write about this after seeing a lot of very absurd idolization of people in popular culture. Namely, there was one post that rubbed me the wrong way.
It delivers this premise, then the remaining 90% of the article has been constructed over added edits over the past 5 years defending against counterarguments. So, perhaps this is a tired, easy dunk. Nevertheless, I am here to throw yet another counterargument onto the fire.
While the above is obviously a toy thought experiment, the overall message of the post seems to depict this kind of success, firstly as the epitome of what success is and that nothing else has met it, but also as entirely the result of one's character traits.
I will give credit where it's due. FAANG (replace Netflix with Nvidia) have claimed the seats of the most powerful companies in the world and have held this position strongly. It is not often a new company can come on the scene, and rise to meet the kings. Tesla did just that, claiming a mostly untapped business sector.
I should preface this is not an Elon hate post, this is a "please don't worship the guy and look outside your tunnel vision to see how many others are doing great things" post.
I think there's a number of issues and biases with this author's perspective.
Skills Don't Come in Ones, but in Twos, Threes, and Fours: The most obvious hole to poke, which the author acknowledges as well right off the bat, is that the traits are correlated. Energy lends itself to persistence and ambition. I think this is substantial enough an effect that it makes the model difficult to take seriously. I don't agree with Emmet Shear on a ton, but I like his notion of Somatic Integrity here, where a single axis of variance is a strong determining factor in all sorts of aptitudes and overall "normal" health. Where I contend on this later on is that it is not necessarily strictly inherited, and may be explained by nurture as much as nature.
We can't all be Winners: Success among humans is not necessarily a zero-sum game, but there is a competitive nature to it. Loosely speaking, one's improvement can be another's loss. Elon has thousands upon thousands of highly skilled employees. This is a finite resource in the sense that companies compete for talent, and brining several more tech leaders onto the scene might mean less hands for fulfilling another company's dreams. For every leader, there must also be a well-sized team. A question that should be considered here is, "Is there room for another Elon Musk?"
Winner Take All: To the previous point, capitalist America has a bit of a winner-take-all system. The incumbent giants continue to grow and acquire more to near monopolies, and often lobby in their favor. Large companies can pay the highest salaries and attract talent with their name. Especially now in the day of AI where you practically need to cough up a certain number of FLOPs to obtain a model with a certain level of capability, it is difficult for newcomers to make it onto the scene. There is just such an excess of resources to make anything they need happen. I really believe nearly anytime a smaller company surpasses a larger, it is because the larger one has blundered, got lazy, or is running inefficiently. By this nature, when we consider the scale that Elon is operating at, it seems the system is more destined to see a few superpowers calling the shots as opposed to many.
Neglecting Lesser Seen Success: Granted, this is not to say great work can't be done at startups of all sizes. There is very much profound expertise and skills happening at startups. The magic of startups and why they continue to ever work at all is that they can move and pivot like a speedboat in ways the giants, like freight carriers, cannot. Though the claim is pointed at Elon, and not many of the lesser known founders doing incredible work at smaller scales and narrower niches. This take suffers from a visibility, fame, and scale heuristic for estimating one's level of skill, and I would bet there are perhaps as strong, if not stronger, candidates out there who go unnoticed.
Money is Fuel to Make Things Happen: Elon now has a net worth of over 300 billion dollars. Creating the change you want to see in the world is a lot easier with the means to fund new ventures, let alone also having the room to fail without losing your livelihood. It does take focus to manage several companies simultaneously. One could ask why Jeff Bezos or other billionaires are not doing the same. However, the point is there are very few people who have the resources to throw at many of the world's hard problems simultaneously. I think many would determined minds would love the chance to be in a financial position where one can solve large scale problems.
Success Begets Further Success: The painted mythical status enables more opportunities to gain a following and rally an effort. XAI was a quickly formed company instantly filled with renowned researchers. For this to happen, you need to have big bucks to pay the researchers and a way to excite them. To be part of Elon's founding team is a medal that can't be awarded anywhere else. There is a feedback loop boosting those who are already successful to further heights while it is difficult to initially get your foot in the door.
Luck, Time, and Place: To the previous point about Tesla arriving right in time to claim an untapped market. There are only so many windows of opportunity like that, and the odds of getting it right are low. I like to think of this kind of unicorn success as sampling a random binary variable, where your odds of succeeding are governed by your skills, the work you put in, and how you respond to an environment, but a lot of it is ultimately often left up to uncontrollable external factors. To do well, you can increase your odds by putting yourself in as many scenarios as possible where there is the opportunity to get lucky, and do what you can to maximize those odds. However, even the highly skilled and driven may not have the cards in their favor or have the time and money to take such risks.
Accomplishments are Medals or Symbols of Skill, not Skill itself: Not dismissing hard work, but if outcomes are in part determined external factors and benefit from a positive feedback loop from there, can we really claim it to be indicative of being in the highest percentile across so many skills? In other words, outcomes and one's character traits are surely correlated, but they're not the sole explaining causal variable. Therefore, applying the inverse, and rating someone by their accomplishments may be prone to inaccuracies. I can tell you in my time working in tech, I have seen very decorated resumes and very empty ones and it is not necessarily as predictive of a model as we'd like it to be in practice. My personal view spending some time in SF around brilliant, hungry minds with a healthy dose of manic energy is that there are a number of people that could go toe-to-toe with Elon, and probably more outside of this bubble. When inferring one's skill level from visible accomplishments, its important to consider how strong the correlation actually is, and how we might be over/underestimating the skill a task warrants. For instance, while the correlation of skill and winning the lottery is almost 0, something like solving the problems in the FrontierMath benchmark is very indicative of skill. That's not something that happens by chance. Most things are somewhere int he middle.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The thing that perhaps bugs me the most about this take is it's actually very defeatist. It puts the man on an unreachable pedestal and says only one man can win this lottery and this is him. To revere to the point of worship is to preemptively and definitively put yourself below, perhaps before you've even had the chance to prove yourself. Not to mention the criteria this was decided on is biased. Even more irritating was to see comments very seriously seeing the solution as expanding the population to increase the number of gifted outliers. This is a reasonable first-choice if we lived in a world inside a high school math problem and governed by uncontrolled random sampling. But we do have control. This is not purely a lottery.
The take not only indicates a failure to decouple outcomes from causal factors and recognize where existing talent lies, but also it neglects the role of nurture and human-empowerment. Before proceeding to double a population, why not lift up the millions we presently have? How many would-be Elon's have we glossed over because they were never given the chance? Better yet, how many would-be Einsteins have we missed because they had their love for learning extinguished in early years or didn't have a proper support system? How do we lift everyone up so much that even those at the 50th percentile are doing great things compared to now? And maybe we shouldn't be seeing all of this as percentiles and on a number line, but that maybe things are just different rather than better or worse. Don't get me wrong, as I mentioned earlier, more leaders means needing more teams, so I am still all for increasing our population, but as long as we can do it in a way where we are not creating more people just to leave them behind.
The world unfortunately doesn't cater to this, still by the "we can't all be winners" principle. There are still a number of menial jobs that need doing, and somehow people need to be made to feel like they belong there to maintain the status quo. Or at least avoid substantial outrage with class discrepancies. The incentive for society to work towards giving everyone an optimal upbringing doesn't feel very high. The American dream is an ideal that is questionable at best. It is possible to move across classes, possibly moreso than other countries, though it can't work for everyone, and subtle obstacles, or perhaps other forms of discouragement are placed along that path.
Now, I had spent much of this post listing out points on the difficulty of making it today and the need for chance to be in your favor. This is perhaps damning for becoming hyper-rich and powerful, but it's not for realizing your potential. I think the ceiling for how much more we can do right by helping people grow and develop is practically non-existent. We have barely nicked the surface of what is possible when people are given a healthy environment and given the tools to grow.
Another reason I felt compelled to write about this is observing how I was treated differently after the sale of LeonardoAi. There was a sudden noticeable upgrade in my reputation and at times I was treated as an authority on matters. I had grown fairly accustomed to being nobody, so this shift was strange, especially as I didn't feel like I changed. I didn't feel like the difference of the end result of public success nor failure of my work should have changed who I was and what I was capable at, I developed the same skills regardless. The outcome was merely a medal or a symbolic representation to show off, which again, correlates with one's aptitude, but they are far from the same! Moreover, I don't think of myself as special, at least not any more than the brilliant people I'm surrounded by. I don't take this to be an impostor syndrome thing. I recognize my talents, but I also recognize my privileges and the long sequence of happenstances that worked in my favor. Granted, we, did everything we could to repeatedly place ourselves in the spotlight of luck, but ultimately still had to strike gold by chance here and there.
The humbling truth is the only thing standing between me and my peers, some of which who are still looking to be given a chance or get their foot initially in the door, are just accomplishments to my name which is silly! I realize, having gone through it, I have valuable experiences and learnings to share, but I don't have any more drive or talent than those around me do. This is really a good thing, that there are so many people looking to do great things. Many talented people without degrees or other symbolic medals are opting for the startup route because of how job applications filter algorithmically as opposed to holistically. It's a harsh reality spurred by a time crunch and information overload. However, it's working for them, and they are getting seen.
If it's not clear from the stance presented in this post, I lean left on most issues. I don't align with the liberal party in all sorts of ways, but the intersection of where I do align is helping everyone achieve maximally regardless of the conditions of birth. I think the strategy of ensuring the many increase fitness wins as opposed to curating for the maximally fit. A place where everyone can build towards their goals I think naturally lends itself to contributing to bettering of humanity and technological progress as a whole.
As the original post states, there are plenty of problems left to solve and low hanging fruit, and doing what we can to arm the masses with ambitions, as opposed to the few, is where we start. With the growth of technology allowing people to do much more as a single set of hands, there has never been a better time to topple the "we can't all be winners" structure and lean into how we can all contribute substantially. The best companies I've seen now are those that can create an internal incubator of excited builders, effectively mini startups, and give them the resources to explore and in turn ensuring that goals align for mutual benefit. More broadly, I think this can be done at a societal level.
I like to describe the difference between single entity-high-resource vs many-lower-resource efforts as searching for treasure on a beach. The single entity is armed with industrial scale excavators that can take out chunks of land at a time whereas the many are armed with shovels but are scattered all about searching far and wide, a bit like the exploration vs exploitation dilemma. I'd argue with the resources available now, it is quite possible to give the many an upgrade from shovels and still benefit from the wide search space.
Elon may be leading the electric vehicle industry, space travel, and now parts of government, but he also has 13 kids he hasn't been a father for and fosters some pretty insane hate and racism on X. I encourage techbros stop getting off to writing fan-fiction on tech leaders as gods and start thinking about how we can all help each other be better than we are now, within our own race.
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