That assumption is often, but not always correct.
We aren't astonished or confused when a broke high school dropout maxes out their credit card on Candy Crush in-app purchases and drives drunk and crashes into a tree. Some people are stupid and stupid people are going to make stupid, thoughtless decisions.
People are more surprised when the rich and powerful do dumb shit like this because of a presumption that they must have been consistently able to not do dumb shit in order to acquire their stature.
But that assumption is very often wrong. Trump had his father slowly plow $700m of his wealth into his son in order to burnish his own image. Musk inherited wealth. SBF came from prestige and then lucked into a historical moment where fake Internet money could temporarily be exchanged for real money.
These people are just fucking morons with limited ability to delay their gratification or think through the consequences of their actions who happened to win the lottery. Most of the time, it's because they lived an entire childhood where they never needed to learn to think about the consequences of their actions because they were completely insulated from them.
Take your juvenile behavior back to Reddit.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/d...
It’s not as if people are saying he’s going to be studied because he’s fascinating. I don’t think he ever tried to cultivate the image that he’s idiotic bordering on the pathological, because that discrepancy seems to be study-worth.
It’s like on one side, there are Musk actions, some call them insane and idiotic, but they can be explained away, theoretically, and then there’s SBF where even the most adamant supporter would just stand there, open-mouthed.