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.
And yet executives in your career field probably would have nodded sagely, assuming that affinity to Musk would confer an appearance of intelligence to them, because they have no idea about the field either.
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
About the only consistent ability they have is to be complete sociopaths to screw over customers, employees, and shareholders alike. Which admittedly is a pretty powerful ability…
It’s the “Peter principle”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Feel like I see a variant where they were never competent, and promoted based more on willingness to game the system than results.
For example, there was this guy who started about the same time as I did, and he was utterly useless. The team would largely endeavor to keep him away from anything important, but he’d still screw things up and cry for help and after saddling his mistake on someone who was going to stay after hours, he’d just leave and hope it got fixed. If the person sorted out his problem, he’d make a big deal about how hard his problem was and now it is resolved and how awesome it was for him to pull it off in spite of the headwinds.
Some years later, the person was in an executive position and the person that pretty much did all the work he was supposed to do had zero promotions. Most of us had learned our lesson and were content to let him thrash (his work wasn’t really important), but there was one guy that couldn’t stand to see work not happen successfully, and thanks to that he was able to get ahead.
The other thing has been that work never promotes from within, they always get some exterior hire that seems to have the qualifications more like ‘was a cool guy at the golf course’ or ‘son of a friend I owe a favor to’.