Elon Musk's epic bacon adventures

shamans

Thinks you can get an STD from flirting.
Joined
Oct 25, 2010
Messages
18,226
Location
Constantly at the STD clinic.
Well, it helps massively to become a billionaire if you are coming from a massively wealthy family.
Same as I don’t think Trump is a very intelligent person.
I dont like Elon and his obvious gimmicks but the guy is a genius. I think he wrote a full interactive in assembly language when he was 14.

Also, Trump is quite smart. He knows what he does and where it will take him.

Money helps but its not money alone that can get you. Bill Gates for instance had a well connected mother but he was also a genius at stanford ahead of his professors.
 

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,656
Location
London
I dont like Elon and his obvious gimmicks but the guy is a genius. I think he wrote a full interactive in assembly language when he was 14.

Also, Trump is quite smart. He knows what he does and where it will take him.

Money helps but its not money alone that can get you. Bill Gates for instance had a well connected mother but he was also a genius at stanford ahead of his professors.
You are throwing genius too much here IMO. And Bill Gates was at Harvard, not Stanford. To be fair, Gates was a prodigy programmer from all accounts, and he had a close to perfect examination score. Musk from what I heard was a great cider, but not Gates/Wozniacki/Allen level.
 

shamans

Thinks you can get an STD from flirting.
Joined
Oct 25, 2010
Messages
18,226
Location
Constantly at the STD clinic.
You are throwing genius too much here IMO. And Bill Gates was at Harvard, not Stanford. To be fair, Gates was a prodigy programmer from all accounts, and he had a close to perfect examination score. Musk from what I heard was a great cider, but not Gates/Wozniacki/Allen level.
Wrong about Stanford then but he was a gifted student especially at Algorithms.

By cider I think you mean coder? Anyway Musk sold a video game for 500 when he was 10 or 12 back in the 80s. That's just the tip of it though. The thing about Musk that's special is how he has such fundamental knowledge of different fields from Comp Sci, to physics to Engineering whereas your average CEO (usually also pretty smart guys) excel at one.

Idk about wozniack/gates level etc but I do consider his entrepreneurial and technical acumen to probably be in the 99.99 percentile of excellence. It depends on what you consider genius. I think Scholes is a footballing genius but he's obviously not Einstein.

Anyway the whole response was for "easy to have rich parents". He's obviously a smart, annoying dude.
 

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,656
Location
London
Wrong about Stanford then but he was a gifted student especially at Algorithms.

By cider I think you mean coder? Anyway Musk sold a video game for 500 when he was 10 or 12 back in the 80s. That's just the tip of it though. The thing about Musk that's special is how he has such fundamental knowledge of different fields from Comp Sci, to physics to Engineering whereas your average CEO (usually also pretty smart guys) excel at one.

Idk about wozniack/gates level etc but I do consider his entrepreneurial and technical acumen to probably be in the 99.99 percentile of excellence. It depends on what you consider genius. I think Scholes is a footballing genius but he's obviously not Einstein.

Anyway the whole response was for "easy to have rich parents". He's obviously a smart, annoying dude.
I agree with most of your post, to be fair. It is impressive that Musk has enough technical skills to be able to follow discussions and give ideas in very different fields.

At the same time, I don't think that he was stellar in either of them (as I mentioned some other coders turned entrepreneurs who at their time might have been considered some of the best coders in the whole world). Additionally, I have seen him either being wrong or totally underestimating things when he talks about AI (despite that he founded OpenAI, and cause his name alone attracted some of the best AI scientists, though most left within a couple of years).

About Gates being gifted at algorithms, I don't even know what that would mean. People are not gifted at algorithms. Like in all other math-related things, you need to study them (though sure, intelligent people digest them easier). As far as I know, he never developed an algorithm, he is not and has never been a researcher. However, he was an exceptionally good coder, which allowed him to start Microsoft with his partner (who was at least as a good coder as him). His main strength was the entrepreneurship and the vision he had though (though personally I think that Microsoft always sucked).
 

shamans

Thinks you can get an STD from flirting.
Joined
Oct 25, 2010
Messages
18,226
Location
Constantly at the STD clinic.
I agree with most of your post, to be fair. It is impressive that Musk has enough technical skills to be able to follow discussions and give ideas in very different fields.

At the same time, I don't think that he was stellar in either of them (as I mentioned some other coders turned entrepreneurs who at their time might have been considered some of the best coders in the whole world). Additionally, I have seen him either being wrong or totally underestimating things when he talks about AI (despite that he founded OpenAI, and cause his name alone attracted some of the best AI scientists, though most left within a couple of years).

About Gates being gifted at algorithms, I don't even know what that would mean. People are not gifted at algorithms. Like in all other math-related things, you need to study them (though sure, intelligent people digest them easier). As far as I know, he never developed an algorithm, he is not and has never been a researcher. However, he was an exceptionally good coder, which allowed him to start Microsoft with his partner (who was at least as a good coder as him). His main strength was the entrepreneurship and the vision he had though (though personally I think that Microsoft always sucked).
What "gifted at algorithms" means is having an innate ability to understand, derive and tackle complex algortihms.

There are intelligent students who will pick up The egg drop problem in a few seconds, then theres Bill Gates who devised and algorithm for for the unsolved pancake sorting problem which was the fastest for 30 years and still kinda is.

He did that as an undergrad who was about to drop out.
 

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,656
Location
London
What "gifted at algorithms" means is having an innate ability to understand, derive and tackle complex algortihms.

There are intelligent students who will pick up The egg drop problem in a few seconds, then theres Bill Gates who devised and algorithm for for the unsolved pancake sorting problem which was the fastest for 30 years and still kinda is.

He did that as an undergrad who was about to drop out.
I wasn’t aware of that paper, but seems nice. In any case, many undergrad (or during the masters) students make publications, some very nice publications. It doesn’t make them exceptionally gifted though.

In any case, as far as I understand he was more a very gifted coder (and an even more gifted entrepreneur) than anything else. And while to be a great coder you need a good knowledge on algorithms and data structures, those are things that can be learned.
 

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,656
Location
London
”Genius” is Newton, Einstein, Hubble, Dirac, Clerk Maxwell... calling Elon fecking Musk a genius is absolutely ridiculous.
He’s a good coder with an excellent entrepreneurial mind.
Von Neumann is the greatest of them all. From all accounts he might be the most intelligent person ever, and in a head to head would have made the likes of Einstein look like an ordinary person. To be fair, his stories are so ridiculous that some are hard to believe.
 

VorZakone

What would Kenny G do?
Joined
May 9, 2013
Messages
33,006
Von Neumann is the greatest of them all. From all accounts he might be the most intelligent person ever, and in a head to head would have made the likes of Einstein look like an ordinary person. To be fair, his stories are so ridiculous that some are hard to believe.
I read about Von Neumann a while ago. By all accounts he was just absolutely ridicilously intelligent. Indeed, hard to believe. I just can't comprehend how someone's brain can have so much more computing power than the rest.
 

Revan

Assumptionman
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
49,656
Location
London
I read about Von Neumann a while ago. By all accounts he was just absolutely ridicilously intelligent. Indeed, hard to believe. I just can't comprehend how someone's brain can have so much more computing power than the rest.
Yep. The sheer intellect of him seems to have been much higher than that of anyone else (maybe Ramanujan comes close), to the point of just not being human. Unfortunately (or fortunately) he didn’t decide to dedicate most of his career to a single topic (like Einstein with relativity), but instead make serious contributions to many fields (mathematics and physics in particular), but also invented game theory, and to a lesser degree computer science and artificial intelligence (or maybe he was an AI sent from the future).
 

UnrelatedPsuedo

I pity the poor fool who stinks like I do!
Joined
Apr 15, 2015
Messages
10,274
Location
Blitztown
Anyone that believes that Musk is the technical mind behind any of his recent company successes is, by definition, admitting that he’s an idiot and that all his companies could be far better

The leaders of the worlds best companies recruit the best minds in the fields relevant to achieving the companies goals.

The guy is an excellent CEO and entrepreneur for his ability to recruit talent, sell a vision and drive progress on unwalked paths. That’s a hugely valuable talent.

It’s also a hugely rarer commodity than IQ.

If he was relying on his own intellect to get self driving cars moving and rockets flying up and down... he’d be penniless.

Surely everyone here has worked at a business in which you can point to a colleague that’s smarter than the owner. I’ve never known a CEO that’s been smarter than every employee. That’s not even close to reality. Anywhere.
 

berbatrick

Renaissance Man
Scout
Joined
Oct 22, 2010
Messages
21,714

I'm re-evaluating my beliefs, the GOAT brain is MAGA and surely I should be too.
 

Brophs

The One and Only
Joined
Nov 28, 2006
Messages
50,466
He's an absolute wrong 'un. The sort of fella who calls his cock "The musket".
 

VorZakone

What would Kenny G do?
Joined
May 9, 2013
Messages
33,006
Fecking hell, I remember when his net worth was around 10 billion, now it's 35+.
 

berbatrick

Renaissance Man
Scout
Joined
Oct 22, 2010
Messages
21,714
Red pill language has become so prevalent and independent of its origin online that I didn't link her being director of the Matrix to the tweet at all, I was wondering why it was being liked and rt'd so much.
 

Pexbo

Winner of the 'I'm not reading that' medal.
Joined
Jun 2, 2009
Messages
68,746
Location
Brizzle
Supports
Big Days
Red pill language has become so prevalent and independent of its origin online that I didn't link her being director of the Matrix to the tweet at all, I was wondering why it was being liked and rt'd so much.
I didn’t even clock it until I read this post
 

Sweet Square

Full Member
Joined
Jun 6, 2013
Messages
23,717
Location
The Zone
In fairness it's quite funny that one of the directors of the matrix is annoyed at someone else appropriating their work.

Somewhere in the Scottish highlands Grant Morrison is pissing himself laughing.