Comment by umbra07
6 months ago
can you point to someone as successful as zuckerberg, who was later conclusively shown to be a fraud or a total moron?
6 months ago
can you point to someone as successful as zuckerberg, who was later conclusively shown to be a fraud or a total moron?
Fortunes are just bigger now in both notional and absolute terms, inevitable with Gini going parabolic, says nothing about the guy on top this week.
Around the turn of the century a company called Enron collapsed in an accounting scandal so meteoric it also took down Arthur Anderson (there used to be be a Big Five). Bad, bad fraud, buncha made up figures, bunch of shady ties to the White House, the whole show.
Enron was helmed by Jeff Skilling, a man described as "incandescently brilliant" by his professors at Wharton. But it was a devious brilliance: it was an S-Tier aptitude for deception, grandiosity, and artful rationalization. This is chronicled in a book called The Smartest Guys in The Room if you want to read about it.
Right before that was the collapse of Long Term Capital Management: a firm so intellectually star studded the book about that is called When Genius Failed. They almost took the banking system with them.
The difference between then and now is that it took a smarter class of criminal to pull off a smaller heist with a much less patient public and much less erosion of institutions and norms. What would have been a front page scandal with prison time in 1995 is a Tuesday in 2025.
The new guys are dumber, not smarter: there aren't any cops chasing them.
"S-Tier aptitude for deception" is also known as intelligence.
I think you'll find a consensus among clinical psychiatrists that the closest technical term for the colloquial notion of someone who puts all of their INT into LIE is Cluster B.
I see no evidence that great mathematicians or scientists or genre-defining artists or other admired abd beloved intellectual luminaries with enduring legacies or the recipients of the highest honors for any of those things skew narcissistic or with severe empathy deficits or any of that.
Brilliant people seem to be drawn from roughly the same ethical and moral distribution as the general public.
1 reply →
the parent asked for moronity OR fraud, kind of a low bar lol
1 reply →
I think he's busy arranging a UFC fight on the whitehouse lawn for the next Independence Day?
Henry Ford. He could make cars. His other endeavors were that of a lunatic.
are we going to overlook the big orange elephant in the white house? listen to him talk. it's hard for me to believe he wouldn't be labeled a moron by most if he wasn't the President.
What does the name of his company Meta refer to?
SBF comes to mind.
SBF wasn't as successful though. His success wasn't even in the same stratosphere as Zuckerberg. His company was around for 3 years. Facebook has been around for over two decades. In terms of net worth, SBF was somewhere around 60th, I think? Zuckerberg was no. 2. Same thing with their respective companies.
> a special order, 350 gallons, and had it shipped from Los Angeles. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla ice cream
yes, there are plenty
more recent example, every single person who touched epstein
Nobody involved with Epstein was as successful as Zuckerberg. Howard Hughes's net worth is 55B adjusted for inflation. And I don't think, "he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle—oddities that were caused in part by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), chronic pain from a near-fatal plane crash, and increasing deafness." fits my "total moron" criteria.
Elon Musk.
[dead]