$9/hour Retail Worker Predicts Musk fall
And would like to be taken seriously
People either love or hate Elon. Let’s explore.
Elon Musk attracts the maddest talent on planet earth to work on impossible projects and solve unsolvable problems. He doesn’t care what color you are or who you sleep with. He knows you’ll have no life while working for him because you’ll barely sleep, spend all your waking hours in the office or lab, and you if you want to spend the night there he will happily buy you a cot to crash there until you wake up and carry on working, unwashed, under-slept and junk-fed. He doesn’t pay anywhere near as much as Google and the other talent magnets, yet he’s able to create this attraction that makes people of IQ 150+ feel they have to come work for him. They invent chopsticks to catch rockets, speech-to-things software to allow your car to hear you and adjust without touching knobs, and reinvent internet access with low orbit satellites that AT&T, Comcast and O2 never imagined possible, and he ate their lunch.
These people work for Elon because he has mad talent for redrawing the future. His IQ is 150 to 165, even the low end being stratospheric compared to normal people. What compounds his unique intelligence is his absence of fear, his hyper-focus and his absolute give-a-shitism about wehat you and I may think of him. Also, his imagination is a wild universe of crazy ideas that mostly can’t be made real. These traits allow him to dream up an impossible invention and then go build it and see if it works. He embraces failure as a necessary ingredient for success. He understands complex questions and challenges his engineers to think differently to overcome blocks. They marvel at his ability to listen, understand and reframe. The worst job that can happen to a super smart person is to work under a stupid manager, who fails to understand and isn’t even curious to learn what they don’t know. Elon inspires the smartest people on earth to work their hardest, be their best and solve unsolvable problems. Yes, Elon is an asshole, almost everyone who worked for him agrees. It doesn’t matter.
Now let’s look at the millions of Elon haters. Their talent levels vary from two-digit IQ — people who simply can’t rise above burger flipper no matter how hard they try — to semi-smart individuals, perhaps fact checkers at Meta (oops, ex-fact checkers now) or administrators at school boards, dental office assistants etc. They love to offer opinions about how Elon made his fortune on the backs of taxpayers, or his parents’ emerald mine, or his rich friends. They seem to believe their intelligence to be on a par with Elon’s. This is fascinating, and most amusing. These are people who struggle to explain how a search engine differs from a large language model, or how private equity differs from venture capital. Yet they’re happy to propagate untrue stories about Elon Musk’s story if it makes them feel less inadequate to believe he was propped up by ‘the system’. These are people who suspect they will fail, and want you to fail too. These people begrudge success because they’re almost certain it will elude them.
Elon was not a product of privilege. Elon’s parents were white trash. His father is a grumpy bully who beat his kids and treated everyone badly. He tried lots of things in his career but was emotionally and intellectually handicapped and therefore not trusted; his endeavors kept failing. The emerald mine was tiny and he owned a minority share — we’re talking a few hundred thousand dollars. The $460M government loan to Tesla was an early days incentive program to help EV companies get a leg up. Tesla repaid that loan and Elon often commented that he wished government would stay out of funding companies because of the bureaucracy and the poor optic around taxpayers funding entrepreneurs. All the other Ev companies receiving loans failed, including Fisker, Canoo, and others you’ve never heard of.
So the next time a moderate income person writes on Medium that Elon Musk is finished, perhaps we take a moment to consider who has monster talent and the ability to create success from nothing, and who has depressingly low levels of imagination, vision, mathematics IQ, scientific discipline or raw creative juice. I’m betting on Elon, not the burger flipper.
