They were never geniuses. They were just rich assholes propped up by other rich assholes.

"It's too late to stop conflating wealth with intelligence"

Regardless of personal qualities, for some reason these people have achieved great things for themselves and humanity, whereas countless competitors, including many other rich assholes, have not.

> achieved great things for themselves and humanity

For themselves? Absolutely.

For humanity? Perhaps we have wildly different ideas of what is good for humanity.

Luck and money.

A lot of people have money, and luck can only explain a single case.

What case? I don't pay for anything YC has ever created.

I'm not sure this is the same situation... SpaceX just began a mission to save stranded scientists in space. And Starlink has legitimate uses.

That doesn't make Musk any less of an egomaniacal idiot in my eyes.

How could they not. The word `wealth` or idea of "money" is completely misleading here. It's cancerous accumulation of resources and influence. They are completely detached from consequential reality. The human brain has not evolved to thrive under conditions of total, unconditional material abundance. People struggle to moderate sugar intake, imagine unlimited access to everything. And it's an inherently amoral existence leading to the necessity of unhinged internal models of the world to justify continuation and reward. Their sense of self-efficacy derailed in zero-g. Listen to them talk about fiction... They literally can't tell the price of a banana, how can they possibly get any meaningful story told? All that is left is the aesthetics and mechanical exterior of narration. How can there be love or friendship with normal people grounding you? You could make everyone you ever met during your lifetime a millionaire, while effectively changing nothing for yourself. Nobody can be this rich and not lose touch with common shared reality.

Billionaires are shameful for the collective, they should be shameful to everyone of us. They are fundamentally most unfit for leadership. They are evidence of civilizatory failure, the least we can do is not idolize them.

Jobs was a sort of cracked genius and a very imperfect human who wanted to be a better human. Money didn't make him worse, or better. It didn't really change him at all on a personal level. It didn't even make him more confident, because he was always that. Look back through anecdotes about him in his life and he's just the same guy, all the time.

Even the stories I heard about him from one of his indirect reports back in the pre-iCEO "Apple is still fucked, NeXT is a distracted mess" era were just like stories told about him from the dawn of Apple and in the iPhone era.

Musk and Altman are opportunists. Musk appears to be a maligant narcissist. Neither seem in a rush to be better humans.

Money removes social feedback. You end up surrounded with bobble heads telling you how genius you are… because they want your money. This is terrible for human psychology. It’s almost like a kind of solitary confinement — solitary in the sense that you are utterly deprived of meaningful rich human contact.

I think about this comparison sometimes https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888?lan...

"Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"

Solitary confinement is a great comparison. But also not existing in the same reality is 99.99% of the population must really warp you too.

it's this more than anything else I wish the general public would understand, those same bobble heads that surround celebrities and eventually warp all sense of costs of common everyday items. We often only see the end result of this when so-and-so celebrity declares bankruptcy and the masses cheer.

In reality they've been vampire sucked dry by close family / friends / salesmen for years and didn't know it.

Sam Altman is not a hapless victim at the mercy of the isolating effects of his financial success.

He was an opportunistic, amoral sociopath before he was rich, and the system he reaps advantage from strongly selects for hucksters of that particular ilk more than anything else.

He's just another Kalanick, Neumann, Holmes or Bankman-Fried.

Are you seriously suggesting Altman is a genius? Or Musk for that matter?

Keep in mind that this is going to be the default option for a lot of forums and social media for automated moderation. Reddit is already using it a lot and now a lot of the front page is clearly feedback farming for OpenAI. What I'm getting at is we're moving towards a future where only a certain type of dialog will be allowed on most social media and Sam Altman and his sponsors get to decide what that looks like. Since he's of YComb stock, the zeitgeist here seems to be let him cook, that is until he doesn't share the wealth with his market-cornering pals here.