With enough money, you don’t have to be good at anything
Following up on our previous coverage, I’ve been enjoying watching the reactions to Isaacson’s book on twitter’s new owner.
My favorite so far has been Dave Karpf’s mastodon live-toot turned substack post. Credit where credit is due, I saw this via a link on One Foot Tsunami, and I’m about to jump on the same quote that both Dave Karpf and Paul Kafasis did:
[Max] Levchin was at a friend’s bachelor pad hanging out with Musk. Some people were playing a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ‘Em. Although Musk was not a card player, he pulled up to the table. “There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” Levchin says. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said “Right, fine, I’m done.” It would be a theme in his life: avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them.
That would turn out to be a good strategy. (page 86)
And, man, that’s just “Masterful gambit, sir”, but meant sincerely.
But this quote is it.. Here’s a guy who found the closest thing to the infinite money cheat in Sim City as exists in real life, and he’s got a fleet of people who think that’s same as being smart. And then finds himself a biographer possessed of such infinite credulity that he can’t tell the difference between being actually good at poker and being someone who found the poker equivalent of typing IDDQD before playing.
With enough money, you don’t have to be good at anything. With infinite lives, you’ll eventually win.
My other favorite piece of recent days is How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson by Elizabeth Lopatto. The subhead sums it up nicely: ” One way to keep Musk’s myth intact is simply not to check things out.”
There’s too much good stuff to pull out a single quote, but it does a great job outlining not only the book’s reflexive responses of “Masterful gambit”, but also the way Isaacson breezes past the labor issues, racism, sexism, transphobia, right-wing turn, or anything vaguely “political”, seeming to treat those things as besides the story. They’re not! That IS the story!
To throw one more elbow at the Steve Jobs book, something that was really funny about it was that Isaacson clearly knew that Jobs had a “reality distortion field” that let him talk people into things, so when Jobs told Isaacson something, Isaacson would go find someone else to corroborate or refute that thing. The problem was, Isaacson would take whatever that other person said as the unvarnished truth, never seeming to notice that he was talking to heavily biased people, like, say, Bill Gates.
With this book, he doesn’t even go that far, just writing down whatever Elno Mork tells him without checking it out, totally looking past the fact that he’s talking to a guy who absolutely loves to just make stuff up all the time.
Like Lopatto points out, this is maddening for many reasons, but not the least of which being that Isaacson has been handed a great story: it turns out the vaunted business techical genius spaceships & cars guy is a jerk whose been dining out on infinite money, a compliant press, and other people’s work for his whole life. “How in the heck did he get this far?” would have been a hell of a book. Unfortunately, the guy with access failed to live up to the moment
The tech/silicon valley-focused press has always had a problem with an enthusiasm for new tech and charismatic tech leaders that trends towards the gullible. Why check things out if this new startup it claiming something you really want to be true? (This isn’t a new problem, I still have the Cue Cat Wired sent me.)
But even more than recent reporting failures like Theranos or the Crypto collapse, Musk’s last year in the wreckage of twitter really seems to be forcing some questions around “Why did you all elevate someone like this for so long? Any why are people still carrying water for him?”