How do you compare this to the stream of ridiculous tweets coming from Musk? It seems Musk gets an almost infinite benefit of the doubt while his interview partner is judged on this one performance.

Also we have the issue of language barrier. Jack Ma was doing the interview in English, which for him is probably extremely difficult. I learned Chinese for 2-3 years and can barely order food. If you combine this language barrier with e.g. the cultural desire to save face, you may have someone saying something to say something, without being able to express themselves properly.

I'd say there are a lot of factors at play here and I would withhold judgment for now.

Re English.

According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma:

> "Ma attended Hangzhou Teacher's Institute (currently known as Hangzhou Normal University) and graduated in 1988 with a B.A. in English.[15][16] While at school, Ma was head of the student council.[17] After graduation, he became a lecturer in English and International Trade at Hangzhou Dianzi University."

Ok, that is a good point, I didn't know this in terms of his background. The way he expressed himself at least didn't feel like he had a BA in English.

I don't think he speaks very good English (verbally). But from past interviews, he seem to have quite a good command of it.

I'm not judging either of them based on 1 interview; just saying language is not the reason his is good or bad.

Elon Musk is either trolling (most of the time) or tweeting while upset (e.g. name-calling a British diver -- who initially randomly insulted Musk, telling him to shove his submarine when he was just trying to help), either way you can see some sense behind his actions, even if they're puerile or mistaken.

On the other hand, Jack Ma seemed to very confidently say and dismiss a lot of things without evidence.

Elon Musk makes stupid statements with confidence all the time. You cant just say "he's joking" in hindsight for everything he's wrong about.

There's a big difference between name-calling someone and accusing them of being a paedophile for doing scuba diving in Thailand.

I mean, watch it yourself and decide. I’d find it difficult to see how anyone could come away with anything other than the more-or-less self-evident notion that Ma is a moron, Musk is extremely intelligent, and they’re both egomaniacal, albeit expressed pretty differently.

I don’t see a reason to compare Ma’s complete lack of reasoning skills to Musk’s absurd tweets. That’s whataboutism. Sure, Musk is all sorts of fucked up in his own way, but he’s no idiot; besides, that isn’t what we’re talking about here — unless for whatever reason you’re trying to defend Ma (which, again, seems like a pretty pointless exercise if you watch even a few minutes of that video), Musk’s weird ass behavior (which wasn’t exhibited in the video in question) has no bearing on this discussion.

I don’t have a dog in this race and would really prefer to never meet either of them, as they both seem pretty insufferable. My point is simply that Ma is damn near indefensibly stupid and (unfortunately, a trait that seems on the rise amongst prominent people in the world today) a poster child of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

This is how i compare it.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5VMX1CznCg Ma is woefully over-rated, an imbecile, on the spectrum or all over the above. And the argument that he must have some 4D Chess abilities to make it to the top in China...do you guys think for a company like that, the CCCP would not groom one of their own for the position?