Just for one specific example: even if I was in his exact situation back then, I wouldn't mortgage out my house, ask friends and family for loans, cash out all of my savings, and then dump it all into my failing green energy startup during its "make it or break it moment". But he did, and none of what Tesla/SpaceX are presently would have been possible if he didn't make that decision.
And that's just one extreme thing that he did that I know for a fact I wouldn't have been able to do, even with the resources and everything else he had.
What's so unlikely to you about the idea that he's relatively intelligent and that's played a part in his success?
People want to pretend it's all luck and connections. I don't think it is, and I think people pretend that to make themselves feel like they could have done it if only they had the same resources.
Nothing, I haven't even questioned his intelligence or said anything about him at all.
I just don't have a slightest clue in how to assess his intelligence and compare it to mine based on what I know about him, which makes me wonder what's making it so obvious to you. Especially when talking about things so blurry as "business decisions", since there are so many outside factors at play in any business that one's intelligence is never a single thing that determines business success.
Occam’s Razor. Maybe it’s possible it’s all sheer luck? But most likely - he’s a shrewd and intelligent business man.
Trump was smarter than Einstein apparently. (Well, Einstein was German, bad example...
They never made it to president, or billionaire status though I don't think... It could be said Trump was more "successful"...
Does success === intelligence? God, I hope not or we're doomed as a species.
Is Donald Trump smart? Well I think it's a non-partisan fact that he outsmarted the entire US political establishment in 2016. You decide how smart that is for yourself.
His campaign has been purposely based on lies and hate, which to me seems like an exact opposite of "smart" even if successful.
An immoral person can be smart. And in fact it's a common and dangerous mistake to assume someone's stupid because you think they're immoral.
Are you arguing it would have been smarter to do something that was unsuccessful?
I find it really weird that you even ask.
A smart person dutifully operates as best they can within the rules.
But a smarter person realises that actually the rules aren't what everyone thought they were in the first place.
There's lots of examples in history.
Navies originally thought that submarine warfare was unfair somehow or against some unwritten gentlemanly rule. The less smart thing to do would be to take that rule and not use submarines. The smarter thing to do would be to say 'don't care' and build submarines anyway.
Football isn't a good example because you're volunteering to play by the rules in the first place.
Operating inside someone else's artificial rules is not smart.
I'm pretty sure that it certainly is an indicator of several personality traits, but it doesn't tell you anything about being "smart".
Challenging assumptions, thinking outside of constraints, re-assessing the foundations of the way we do things, redefining what is possible... smart.
Galileo had to break the 'rules' to model the solar system. Do you think he would have been smarter if he'd followed the current thinking instead?
BTW. Did you even notice that you just compared Trump's campaign to Galileo's work?
I don't think you do. You've just made a moral point. But we're talking about how smart people are, not how moral they are.
It could be very smart to find a way to steal something. That doesn't make it moral to do so.
> BTW. Did you even notice that you just compared Trump's campaign to Galileo's work?
But again, that's moral not smart.
See if you can rephrase your point without any reference to morals, and I think you'll see where you're confused.
Just taking things because nobody's looking is not "smart" regardless of its morality, of course. Even if you were doing it to steal from the rich and feed the poor, there's nothing smart in it, even when it's successful. You don't need exceptional intelligence to do that. Just like you don't need exceptional intelligence to build your political capital on xenophobia. That's just dumb brute force, not smartness. Everyone knows you can do that if you're willing to get dirty enough, it worked many times in the past already. What could be smart is to successfully build that same capital without resorting to such lazy and harmful tactics, as that would require much more wit to pull off.
You need the intelligence to see which rules really impact you and which don't. That requires insight.
> What could be smart is to successfully build that same capital without resorting to such lazy and harmful tactics
Often being 'lazy' is the smart thing to do. Why do extra work that you don't need to do?
What's why I think you're confusing it with morality. You're saying it's better to do it without being lazy... but why? If being lazy gets you the same or better result, then surely it's the smart thing to do?
Because of the consequences.
Tesla had used customer-grade components for control & entertainment systems in their cars. Nobody else did that, what a smart thing to do! They recognized that there's a rule to break to cut costs!
...unfortunately, the customer-grade touchscreen panels in their cars were breaking so often for exactly the reasons why you don't use them in cars and go for more expensive and harder to obtain industrial-grade components instead that they were fined and forced to recall whole production runs.
Now, if you actually did figure out a thing that nobody did before in order to put less work or cut costs and achieve the same or better results - you'd be indeed smart. Neither Trump's campaign nor Tesla's use of customer-grade electronics were examples of that. They just did something that others did not because of other factors than their intelligence.
Some rules are there for a reason and breaking them does not make you smart.
The smart thing was to realise that in fact there were no consequences to breaking some rules.
> Some rules are there for a reason
And others are not. Telling the difference requires you to be... smart.