Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I feel like Musk was a symptom of Americans really wanting a genius billionaire to be a real thing as it reinforces this American dream everyone’s dreaming about.

    Reading the CPAC transcript clearly shows that he’s currently below average intelligence if anything.

    • JaymesRS@literature.cafe
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      1 month ago

      My feelings are that Steve Jobs was the quintessential cultural personality CEO and his early death sent a lot of people desperately looking for the next one, who ended up being Elon.

      The difference was that Jobs actually had taste and a good vision for the future. He could build a smart team and let them drive progress then motivate to go further without making things up like Elon. So the media papered over Elon’s wild confabulation, instead of showing him in a true light.

      • halowpeano@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Most of that’s false though. He couldn’t build a good smart team, Wozniak could. He was very good at screwing others out of ownership in the company they helped build though. He was also very good at one thing, envisioning a computer in every home, and a computer in every pocket. That was his one true talent.

        But he was not “smart”. He died to cancer detected early enough to heal with modern medicine, but chose quack treatments instead. There really isn’t any such thing as general intelligence. Everyone’s got very specialized knowledge in some topic, and are idiots in everything else.

        • merari42@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Na, that is just historically inaccurate. The original Macintosh team collected their stories/memoires at folklore.org, which give you a pretty good overview of his talents. He was really mercurial and Woz was the better engineer, but played a really important role in the vision/design of computers as we know them today. In the original Mac team others did the engineering and Jobs never claimed to be and engineering type of person, but he had a good feel on the importance of design, clear visual metaphors and good interaction design and pushed the team relentlessly into that direction.

        • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          He was quite good at marketing. He wasn’t a technical guy and apparently wasn’t terribly good at driving technical people either. But he was great at selling whatever the tech people came up with.

        • RowRowRowYourBot
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          1 month ago

          Quack treatments meant he could keep working. Modern medicine would mean he would have to admit his beliefs about human health were wrong.

        • RowRowRowYourBot
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          1 month ago

          With an all fruit diet because everything else creates “mucus” which is bad according to his anti-scientific bullshit.

          An all fruit diet IRL is horrible for cancer as cancers feed on sugars.

          • funkless_eck
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            1 month ago

            which he inherited from a Venusian Space Magic cult who believe the Roswel landing was people from Venus who gave us the raw fruit diet to heal all human illnesses because that’s what they do on Venus.

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Had a colleague die from cancer, after being given a very good prognosis with treatment and declining all that because he read somewhere just getting a whole bunch of vitamin C would reverse cancer.

            His case he had a powerful personal anecdote, a brother he lost to cancer who did try the medical route and died after a miserable treatment course. He even acknowledged that the prognosis was dire for his brother from the onset, and they described medical intervention in the brother’s case as a long shot versus his being probably curable. We tried to share our own anecdotes about friends and family that were saved by cancer treatment, but ultimately nothing could overcome his personal experience seeing how much the medical treatments made his brother suffer and it failed to help in the end.

      • burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        steve didnt take SHOWERS. he stunk up the office and his employees had to beg him to clean himself before meetings with potential investors and customers

      • RowRowRowYourBot
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        1 month ago

        Musk and Jobs are both business savvy people who had good publicists. The difference is Elon fired his good publicists years ago so now we all know the truth.

        Steve Jobs was a bad guy. He wasn’t much better than Musk. He was just smart enough to not fire his pr team.

    • Kite
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      1 month ago

      You can have a high IQ and still be an utterly inept moron. I have family in Mensa and they are hands down some of the laziest, stupidest people I know.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Mensa is utterly meaningless and so is any IQ test. We hardly understand how brain works and some think we can evaluate it through some online test and assign a number to it?

        Ridiculous and anyone who’d fall for that should buy a bridge from me I have in Brooklyn to become a billionaire by collecting road tax fee, ayy great deal only mensa geniuses would recognize 😆

        • Kite
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          1 month ago

          Oh, I know it’s ridiculous. They took my family member, that’s all I needed to see to realize that.