Unpopular Opinion

He has no technical aptitude, he just had the right money at the right time, born in the right place.

Money ≠ Intelligence and your entire argument seems to be based on this erroneous assumption.

No-one becomes a multi-billionaire due to a lack of intelligence or common sense.

Not "due to", but people all thoroughout history have amassed great wealth despite a lack of intelligence. Especially when they are born into privilege.

People don't call Musk an idiot because he's a blithering imbecile who is incapable of anything. We call him an idiot because he's not particularly smart like others make him out to be. He's an idiot like the average guy.

He's made some good choices and some bad choices. Not especially dumb, not especially smart.

Not a genius.

So... people call him an idiot in an attempt to offset the genius talk.

I read that whole post in Elon's voice. And also this...

I see what you're saying and I'll offer an alternative. Elon is a businessman. He is not a genius, he is not technical, he is not an engineer. Him being interested in those subjects does not an expert make. At his core though, he is a businessman, and runs businesses. At the beginning of his career we can agree that with Paypal and Tesla he did well in making those businesses successful.

I do think he has an ulterior motive with Twitter. It just flopped too quickly to be coincidence. Any decent merger/takeover has a strategy, and usually the first several months of that strategy is "Keep things running normally, watch what happens, and then start making adjustments". He came in and turned everything upside down, cutting departments left and right without any cares. Even he knows that torpedoes a company. Even if you do think the departments are redundant, cutting them randomly only sews chaos. I think that chaos was intentional.

Instead of buying Twitter, he could have started his own network. Would have been much cheaper, even if he would have done crazy marketing around it. And he wouldn’t have to deal with all the legacy code and social media legislations.

I agree that he was smart. But people change, especially when they get stupid rich. He lost his marbles.

If he’s not stupid what do you propose he is?

Eh, you can't rely on votes made, unfortunately. Too many people use it to disagree for it to be a sign of an opinion being deemed not unpopular, or vice versa.

Fwiw, I agree that this is currently unpopular, though I disagree with it and my vote was up.

My disagreement is in the colloquial usage of idiot vs a stricter usage. Old school, idiot was a term to indicate functional intelligence, or rather the lack thereof. Now, it has come to mean someone either making poor choices via bad thinking, or someone that's ignoring any thought at all

Musk -definitely- fits the looser usage. Not specifically because of twitter, it is reflected in all his business decisions of the last decade. Twitter, he isn't making decisions, he's following someone else's plan, and that's the decision he made.

I don't think his actual iq is relevant tbh. You can be a genius (and he isn't) and still fail to use that. He makes poor use of what brains he does have, which makes him an idiot overall.

I watched a clip from an interview Jordan Peterson gave Musk. I'm no fan of Peterson, but it was clear from even a short watch that Musk was just not on Peterson's level.

And I'm not sure Twitter is a failure. It's well known that Musk can't make a dollar without a protective and generous government. And we don't know how much Chinese and Russian intelligence are paying for twitter.