Paradoxically - this is a path to success - their self-belief is so strong that it's very convincing - and so long as they have 'success' to point to - then it all snowballs from there.
The press writes 'puff pieces' to build up character, they read it and believe it.
I witnessed this with the CEO of an F50 firm that I worked at. This CEO would say crazy, irrational things, make up words. Even to the press - nobody called him out on it - because we were doing well. Printing money. Everyone at the company treated him like some kind of demi-god. Then, when things started to go awry, the press started calling him out on his nonsense, eventually lost his job.
This article is a good example: Thiel is obviously a smart, successful man. But look at how crazy some of his statements are! Most people saying such things would be laughed out of the house. But they have enough acolytes who just eat it all up.
Most of these guys are not really genuises
Crashing “the fastest car in the world.” and coming out of it without a scratch = Made up story. It seems like Thiel makes up exicting heroic stories, just like Trump, to compensate for an otherwise boring excitement-less life.
1 main reason I am calling BS on the story is cos Theil alleges he wasn't wearing a seat belt, and the car wrecked. My cousin DIED because he wasn't wearing a seat belt, and he didn't wreck the car, he hit a tree on the corner at 25 mph (yep 25 mph).
The only wreck pics that come up are the ones of his Model S crash. There's absolutely nothing on this alleged crash/wreck that Theil and Musk were allegedly involved in and came out "without a scratch". https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1...
He recalls a story from his and Mr. Musk’s PayPal days, when Mr. Musk joined the engineering team’s poker game and bet everything on every hand, admitting only afterward that it was his first time playing poker. Then there was the time they were driving in Mr. Musk’s McLaren F1 car, “the fastest car in the world.” It hit an embankment, achieved liftoff, made a 360-degree horizontal turn, crashed and was destroyed.
“It was a miracle neither of us were hurt,” Mr. Thiel says. “I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, which is not advisable. Elon’s first comment was, ‘Wow, Peter, that was really intense.’ And then it was: ‘You know, I had read all these stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them. But I knew it would never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.’ And then we hitchhiked the rest of the way to the meeting.”