Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?
A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.
Is musk really intelligent? He’s not dumb but honestly seems like most of his success is from buying things and or getting smart people under him who are able to succeed despite his medlling. The ideas he forces through tend to be bad. Giga factory was largely a disaster and he had to relearn manufacturing. Giga casting? Dead. A lot of the super heavy stuff he’s directly influenced failed or are drawing out the timeline as the struggle to address. Cybertruck and semi…
Musk and Jobs are/ were highly effective psychopaths. Not geniuses in an academic sense but incredibly shrewd and calculated.
Gates, Bezos, Zuck, Page and the likes are very intelligent and very confident. Like I wouldn’t be able to one up any of them in a debate, but I wouldn’t be afraid of them trying to destroy my life out of spite.
Hiring smart people and seeing market opportunities and executing on those opportunities absolutely are skills. It’s the same sort of skills Hitler had, where most of the genius lies around organising people around a common goal.
A lot of companies either get the smart people, time market opportunities perfectly, or execute perfectly on a clear vision, but very few do all three at the same time and tend to fail. The first (lots of smart people) run out of money, the second is the “too early” group and their ideas get taken by someone else, and the third spends their resources going in the wrong direction.
Elon Musk wasn’t successful because he knows a lot about electric cars or rockets, he was successful because he saw an opportunity, secured enough funding, hired the right people, and focused those people in the right direction.
You can be incredibly smart in one area and incredibly dumb in others. Elon is great at pitching an idea to get funding, and using that funding to hire the right people. He fails when he overrides those smart people.