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.
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.
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.
some, like me, are idiots in everything
elseI doubt that.
Time has been kind to Mr. Jobs. Read about his early years at Apple… he was famous for skewering anyone that disagreed with him. He also had lovely habits like parking his sports car in handicapped spots so he didn’t have to walk as far. You can’t disagree with his talent for running a company that did an awful lot of innovation, but he wasn’t a nice guy. He named one of his first products, the Lisa after his daughter, but didn’t treat the actual daughter that well.
For a “smart” person, his death was quite possibly a very unintelligent way to go. He basically decided to give all kinds of “holistic” crap a chance to treat his cancer and avoided medical intervention for almost a year. If he had gone with the medical path from the onset, he might still be alive today.
But he did have his moments. Like how he basically told the music industry to cut out the DRM, because it just made the ecosystem impossible. Or one time when someone was picking at him over abandoning OpenDoc in favor of Java (Java didn’t work out either, but his response was on point, without being dismissive of the person).
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