My understanding is the same and I believe it's pretty obvious why they always seem to be that way. It takes a tremendous amount of self-confidence to push through "the system" in any meaningful way and that often comes off as assholish. It also causes them to behave the same in every aspect of their life. They don't compartmentalize being an asshole in business, but they're a Mr. Rogers for everything else.

That kind of confidence is pervasive in every aspect of their being. They don't have room for doubt.

Reading about wartime generals solidified the thought in me. Many generals like Patton weren't even very gifted strategically, but they were confident and authoritative in their decisions. Oftentimes, that's enough to pull off a victory.

How do you know there weren't equally capable non-assholes that the assholes pushed out of the way? Isn't that the story of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison?

That's a really excellent historical example to bring up, and, "no".

Edison and Tesla were definitely NOT equally capable. Tesla was an absolutely genius inventor and scientist, and Edison was a genius businessperson and good inventor. (Or something like that, TBH it wasn't Edison's biographies I poured over in highschool!)

Tesla received life-long backing and support from Westinghouse, major investment from JP Morgan, and more.

Edison tried, and for a chunk of time, did succeed at pushing Tesla out of the way, but I'd strongly argue that the things that sunk Tesla were not ways that Edison pushed him out of the way, nor would I argue that Edison ever really succeeded at pushing him out of the way.

Thanks for the correction. I think the overall point still stands though. Maybe the reason we think that mostly only assholes are game changers is because they pushed aside, or wrote out of history, equally capable non-assholes. It's definitely the kind of thing an asshole would do.

It seems like that because these kind of assholes also wrote the history books (or paid the guys that did)....

Henry ford wrote a book titled the international Jew.

Is that what you mean?

For most of civilization we've been able to overlook the fact that our leaders and heroes are gigantic assholes, and judge them by their great deeds rather than minutiae of their private interactions.

I think the particular argument is that this exact lack of accountability was a mistake and allowed a lot of bad outcomes for a lot of people and only worked for those who already had the power to begin with.

Musk has done nothing for humanity.

It is literally just wasting resources.