Guy decides to merge his existing business with a tangential money transfer business, which he then convinces everyone that he should CEO. Six months in he decides that his business should get **** canned and they should focus on the junior portion of the business, which is now a 96b company called paypal.

Then he made a successful rocket ship company.

Prob just luck.

Look at Zuckerberg. High level genius, or average Harvard smarts who was in the right place at the right time in the right era? It's obviously the latter. A bunch of the tech billionaires fit into that category.

And of course the rocket company was luck. He was on the verge of bankruptcy on both SpaceX and Tesla after heaps of failures, when his final one worked after many years of trying. Given the string of failures so far it would have been way less than 50%. Ergo, luck is the main reason he is here.

But don't listen to me. Listen to Elon Musk:

So clearly luck played a large role.

Compare this with Bezos, Gates, Jobs, etc etc, even the crazy McAfee. None of them came close to failing because these guys actually are geniuses, unlike Musk.

There are millions of entrepreneurs. Some hit runner runners. Musk obviously hit a couple of runner runners. That's not to take away from his talent, but it's worth keeping in mind. Luckboxing into a space company doesn't mean you can build a successful mass manufacturing car company.

Definitely strongly disagree with you about Zuck. He's clearly much more talented than you're giving him credit for.

I definitely think Musk doesn't give a **** about money and it shows very strongly. That's how he got to be where he is, and it's the thing that will probably lead to him being broke at some point. But that will be brief because he's one of the better fundraisers on earth.

Zuckerberg is Harvard level smart. But come on. A good percentage of the people in his situation when the Lurch Twins gave him the idea would be billionaires now. Right place, right time. He's made good business decisions but he got thrown a softball and had a lot of help from Silicon Valley's smartest guys.

Musk deeply cares about money. That's why he's used investment banks to borrow $650 million against a few billion worth of Tesla stock (about 30% of his stake). He likes the billionaire lifestyle. Why else is he so desperate to keep the stock price up?

High-level genius is probably a detriment to business success unless you can find excellent executors and sales people.

Model 3 confirmed a cuckmobile:

https://www.consumerreports.org/hybr...ecommendation/
Will it ultimately matter to their sales given that are finally supply limited? I don't know.

As far as zuckerberg being average intelligence for a Harvard guy, lol. Tooth seems to put a bunch of stock into IQ tests, but even if he was average for a non-legacy white guy (he isn't), his standardized test scores would likely be easily in the 99th percentile, which would be above 135. He's clearly by all accounts above average for a Harvard CS major. And the average Harvard CS major is a genius.

lol at the Halo Effect you're falling for. The hard evidence suggests that Zuckerberg (a psychology major) is actually well below the average Harvard CS major

The Worst-Kept Secret About Mark Zuckerberg Is That He's *Not* Actually A Coding Genius

He's just a sleazy guy in the right place at the right time who rode it up.

The rest of the rich tech pack are of course geniuses - Gates, Bezos, etc are exceptionally intelligent people and there is a lot of evidence for that.

He took a bunch of computer science classes at Harvard and by all accounts excelled.

So you're saying a billionaire running an enormous business with no current coding responsibilities hasn't worked to be top tier coder at some website? You don't say?

By what accounts? It seems to be a settled question that he was barely average and struggled in low level courses more gifted students aced without trying.

https://www.quora.com/Was-Mark-Zucke...lly-at-Harvard

And if you'd bothered to check, that profile is from 2002 when he was a nobody. I can't see how any coding genius could do that poorly, especially since he'd been tutored in it from a young age.

He was just an average guy in the right place at the right time with a creeper's understanding of what people want in a stalkbook site.

ahahahahaha you're linking to a quora thread, hilarious

Why? It lays out what courses he took and their difficulty, and contemporary accounts of his abilities. You've laid out what exactly? Bold claims that your brother-cuck-in-arms:

Again, what accounts? So far my quora thread is crushing your non-existent evidence.

Of all the kids I know from Harvard and other competitive academic programs/institutions, close to 90% (if not more) of the top 10% in intelligence did not end up in the top 10% of GPA. With the smartest kids, there is often a mentality of "I can learn in one night what average kids learn in an entire semester so I don't have to study until then." That's not a recipe for straight A's.

Another issue with top tier kids is they are often solving problems in an unintended way because they never did the way it's taught in class. Even when they get to the answer, it will often end up with partial credit. That's not recipe for As either.

Another common issue that comes up is they often struggle with "show work" because they aren't even conscious of some of the logical processes that more average students get hung up on. You see this a lot in a different form with second language speakers having an easier time with sentence correction on GMAT than native speakers.

I am not saying Zuckerberg was or was not in top 10% intellectually. I am saying the evidence you cited doesn't move the Bayesian needle much if at all.

I think this is an illusion. Particularly since measures of achievement across the academic lifespan correlate so very strongly.
This happened maybe never? I just don't buy the notion that smarter people are doing worse at their courses, or can't down gear, or are such geniuses that they have magical ways of solving problems - getting the correct answer - but marked down. Life just doesn't work like that, and the data is strongly against your special pleading given how well measured performance correlates across the lifespan

I do think that thinking for yourself and thinking differently are valuable qualities and may not be strongly correlated with academic success. But I'm not sure they're correlated with genius either in the Harvard population. They're probably a positive of entrepreneurial skill.

Regardless, the data in question doesn't speak to this. It speaks to him struggling with basic courses. And CS is a mastery type profession, not unlike language acquisition, where the lower levels are trivially easy for the capable and pretty hard for the not-capable.

With the news about the base $35k Model 3 being pushed off far into the future it made me think, does it even help Tesla's outlook in any way for them to rapidly ramp up production if Tesla can't ever reach the goal of profitably mass producing the base model 3? How many Teslas can they sell per year at $55k+?

No, TS. You are just wrong. The correlation between IQ and academic performance is an extremely well studied topic and they consistently show that beyond certain IQ (thresholds are different for different subjects but even for math we are talking about 120s, not 140s) higher IQ is much less relevant than work discipline and that extremely high level of IQ (you see a lot of what I described in studies of "gifted students") is as actually one of the strongest predictors of weak work ethic and psychological issues in academic settings.

This is at least in part due to self selection. It's hard to make it to tough academic programs with ****ty work ethic unless you're really smart. You also dont randomly add tough courses unless you have no doubt about your ability to pass.

WRT to basic courses. You'd not say this if you've spent time in those classes and graded those exams. Understanding the material is t re trivially easy. Acing them is not. And in practice what happens a lot is with easier courses work ethic actually becomes more important because even average students can uh understand the material and stuff like handing **** in on time and following professor's preferred format become more important.

I think we can have a rough idea. Demand for the S/X seems to be topping out at around 50K each/year. That's WITH a $7K tax bonus.

I mean, max demand is determined by the lowest price, and that's $68K. Tesla actually dropped the price of those by $5K, and yet you could have a S/X in weeks at the lower price point. If they could profitably sell the S/X at higher volume they would have done so.

It's not a bad way to estimate imo. So that means there are maybe 100K users at the $55K price point. I'd lean toward that number being on the high side given the following facts:

- The car kind of stinks as a luxury car. Consumer Reports goes into why...and $55K is getting close to luxury level. The "ma-I-stucks-an-iPad-my-wood-dash!" look is clown end of the luxury spectrum.

- We had 15 seconds of dead silence on the last conference call when Musk was asked about the conversion rate from deposit to buying, at which point they went to Youtube questions.

This edmunds review is amazing

https://www.edmunds.com/tesla/model-...pril-2018.html

I feel like the 35k option is going to be really unpopular, basically for the same purpose as the cheapest shampoo in store.

A lot to unpack here

CNBC has Consumer Reports on air talking about Tesla poor braking. He recommended Audi at the end. Lol

What are the odds we get a major recall at some point? They're clearly incompetent at making reliable cars. I mean, Musk's comments today about braking confirm that.

Lol, CR basically called Elons bluff saying if you can fix braking OTA we will retest it.



You know tesla is going to divert every engineer they have to trying to find a hack fix for this.

Is there a tech version of The Onion? My Tesla news feed is starting to read like it.
The VP of monetization at SnapChat is becoming the VP of engineering at a car maker?

Come to think of it, does that mean Doug Field is on permanent leave? Or will they simply have two VPs of engineering going forward?