So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.

Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.

108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.

Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.

So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.

You’re arguing that there are other factors that also influence outcomes (and that those other factors are stronger forces).

I agree with that point, but that’s not a refutation to the notion that the coefficients on talent and hard work are positive, nor a convincing argument that success is unrelated to those two factors.

Millions of people had an equal or better starting condition than Mark Zuckerberg so we aren't really lacking privileged people, but vanishingly few of those do become ultra wealthy.

Those are just two different points on the "wealthy" scale. If you zoom out on a global level, they are not very far apart.

The kind of upper-middle class family that produces startup founders tends to be from the rich countries.

It makes perfect sense that it's the pretty wealthy and not the super-wealthy. There's more of the UMC, and they only need a certain amount of social/economic capital to roll the dice.

Humorous analogy: Imagine you’re playing a video game where, through a mix of skill and luck, you stumble upon an incredibly overpowered weapon. With even minimal competence, this weapon lets you easily acquire even more powerful gear, initiating a self-reinforcing loop that rapidly propels you to dominance. Soon enough, your advantage reshapes the entire game—limiting access to similar weapons for other players. The game stops being fun, or as some might put it, it becomes fundamentally unfair.

Without forced redistribution of wealth/power that set hard limits you're going to get a runaway, and the whole thing melts down.

This won't happen if the people with wealth/power care about consequences and have the wisdom to model outcomes accurately. But the kinds of people who care about consequences in capitalism are unlikely to be chasing huge wealth in the first place.

The system cannot work. It's fundamentally manic depressive, alternating between irrationally exuberant booms and catastrophic crashes, and consuming talent and raw materials for self-defeating ends.

It's complex.

This is the thread GP was supposed to be a reply to:

> > Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success?

> I do.

But, I do know for sure that being wealthy is correlated to neither skill nor hard work, but savvy leverage of the skill and hard work of others. That shit has to end. You should make proportional to the work you put in. Shareholders and investors are even worse.

But whatever. I do not expect the world to improve at this point. We’re just stuck in a shitty place (as humanity) and asked to be grateful for the insight of the rich.

Throughout the 20th century we have seen what such a social structure leads to: millions of deaths from hunger. And always, without exception: the transition to work-based economy - and in the next decade the population becomes many times poorer and a huge percentage of the population dies of starvation.

So no thanks. Between shareholders and investors, and starvation, I choose shareholders and investors.

Any of us could get hit by a meteor or drop dead at any minute, but working harder towards goals in aggregate moves us towards those goals, so I don't understand how this logic works?

You’ve committed the typical sin on this site of overrating technical prowess and underrating business acumen. There’s a reason so many founder CEOs from his era ended up getting sacked while he’s maintained control and Meta has become the behemoth it is. Next you're going to tell us how Steve Jobs was a charlatan and a cheat.

Is the act of buying a lottery ticket a "rounding error" when it comes to winning the powerball?

By the way, the act of buying a power ball ticket is essentially a rounding error. The odds of winning the grand prize (which is what we're talking about here) is 1 in 292,201,338. That is for all intents and purposes the same as zero.

Even if you just take the advantage of being born in the United States (which, fine, exclude Musk from that list then) 7 of the 10 people on the list, including Zuckerberg, are among 5% "luckiest" people in the world just based on where they were born.

This is eliminating any luck they got from hereditary wealth, geographical location, and catching the surge of value in their respective industry at the exact right time.

The guy who has made billions needs the stronger form of this karma-like idea.

I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.

The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily.

The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself.

It’s just plainly evident in every sector of our economy. You don’t have to pay for the bad shit you do. Look at tobacco. Tobacco is a zero-value or negative-value industry. The sheer existence of tobacco actively makes the world a worse place.

But guess what? They don’t pay for your COPD medicine. They don’t pay for your congestive heart failure. But they will happily take your money for a carton.

All bad costs are externalizer, and all profit is kept. The end result is obvious. The more good you do, the stupider you are. The more evil you do, the more money you make.

You don't need to make things better to make money.

If I was asked about the best correlate for being evil, honestly trying to make the world a better place by determining how specifically others should live would be on top of the list by a huge margin.

Really? Telling people, "hey, don't give other's poison, that's bad"... is worse than giving other's poison? You actually believe that?

To give some context, I used to smoke. For a long time!

Nobody wants to smoke. The only people that want you to smoke are the people literally extracting value out of your rotting corpse.

Look, if you actually think those people are better, then whatever. Clearly this isn't something I can dispute or even try to argue against so who cares. Just... find some medication or something, I don't know. This pathetic, self-destructive method of thinking can't be right.

I got "marble rich" because I knew who the good players were and when one came a long I put my foot over my marble. Once you knew the trick it was impossible not to win on average and be a few marbles better off every day. Even a slight positive over a few weeks turns into a lot.

At a certain point I stopped finding this desirable and felt a bit guilty about it - the marbles were of no use to me really and it was enough to know that I had the trick of succeeding.

I wonder if this is roughly how people get wealthy in real life other than that they don't think "enough".

The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.

I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.

If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Every step of that is inaccessible to someone hardworking and talented. So let's say you got lucky once or was born with wealth available to you - you can skip the whole talent and work thing.

Even today high effort jobs tend to be low paying, paper shuffling, or keyboard tapping tends to pay better.

On average or for a particular person? Maybe on average there’s an effect (r=.4), so there will be many people for whom that correlation is in their individual case actually negative. Some struggle with this notion, and assume success must signal talent or hard work in individual cases. How one defines success matters a lot too. If one is comparing zuck to some random CEO, say collison, can you say zuck is more hardworking or talented? He is more successful on paper, but I doubt he is significantly more hardworking or talented.

The person working hard with the same company for 15 years with extensively proven track record and well known impact across the organization?

Or the interview candidate with 5yrs experience?

Yet every time, companies roll out the red carpet for the new guy. He’s probably at least half bluffing and the new company has little concrete evidence of his past performance.

It's obviously more complex than this, but I think it's more useful to think of it as a product. You don't need a high value in any of them to succeed, but a tiny value in even one means you need an astronomical value somewhere else.

And therefore when people say [some race] makes no difference in [some behaviour], and other people say "Why is it always [some race] when we see [some behaviour]", and others say "the observation that [some race] leads to [some behaviour] is false because 50% of the time I see [some other race] being worse than [some race] in terms of [some behaviour]" they are all completely right, but just focusing on different properties of the distribution.

So back to your example, yes, in the extremes, many people who are ultrawealthy may have had those behaviours. But by far and large those behaviours don't make much of a difference to the overwhelming majority of the population, and therefore it's likely that other factors were far more important in terms of making an ultrawealthy person becoming ultrawealthy in the first place. At best, someone who was destined to be ultrawealthy didn't make it because they didn't have those behaviours, but that's more like winning the lottery and being too forgetful to go cash it in, rather than having characteristics that will help you win the lottery in the first place.

It’s not that interesting or relevant to me whether Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos had talent or work ethic as significant elements of their success. It is interesting and relevant to me as an adult, parent, and mentor the role that talent and hard work play in outcomes for my family and the students I mentor.

I strongly doubt it’s anything other than a positive correlation and believe that the correlation is relevant for normal people.

If anything, your definition is rather tautological: success is the expected outcome of hard work, which cannot be obtained without it.

Whereas in the case of the ultraworthy, the whole point is that hard work cannot reasonably be expected to lead to astronomical wealth in the absence of other factors, and, in the presence of those factors astronomical wealth might even occur without any hard work. So if ultrawealth is one's definition of success, then no hard work is little more than a red herring.

Statistically, no.

I literally don't even know what kind of work I should do if I wanted to make a billion dollars. I think it's mostly delegating, and convincing people to give me ownership of things that throw off money that I get, or to invest in things for which I have such ownership so my ownership becomes more valuable. But in concrete terms, I don't even know what to do to make that happen, like, step 1 of that process, I have no idea. Just being talented at programming and working hard at it (more talented than I am, and working harder than I do, even) doesn't seem to be a great way to get there. You have to focus on and have talent for activities that cause capital to end up owned by you, and I have zero idea where to even start with that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, I was socialized as a kid into a smear of multiple Fussellian "Prole" categories, plus his "Middle", so I have to hype myself up and still feel bad just to hire a plumber and not hover around them because I feel like I ought to be helping (and definitely feel like I've failed on some level any time I choose to do that instead of doing the work myself), and the notion of owning a business but not working at, or just being a kind of hype-man for it mostly for my personal benefit, weirds me the fuck out, it feels fragile and strange. Why would people let me do that and make so much money from it? It's so weird; I get that's how things work, but the idea of doing it feels scary and kinda gross, and I don't mean because of risk of failure.

I think I'd need a huge mindset shift and a totally different skillset to get actually-rich. I'd need to be a different person entirely. Meanwhile there's a long list of things I am or could become talented at, and could work hard at, and that produce real value, that might make me a living but will never get me past seven or maaaaybe with a ton of right-place-right-time luck ten digits of lifetime earnings, let alone net worth.

Timing plays a huge role in this too.

There's a shockingly large number of people out there with buckets of "intelligence + talent + ideas" who never get the opportunity to move to the "implementation" phase of anything as they're too busy surviving, and the world is all the poorer for it.

As if that cruel ignominy weren't enough on its own, we are also blessed with the spectacle of ignoramuses piling up and blaming the "plebs" for a situation they've no control over. What a double whammy.

In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other programmers, working just as hard and just as talented, were trying to make their web app hit at that time and failed.

That's how life is. It is a lottery ticket that Zuck is super rich. And it's a strawman to act as if pointing this out means that hard work and talent don't matter.

And FWIW, the overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy. I am kind of a broken record on this, but I think Meta's entire business is basically the oxycontin of the online world, and that everyone involved should feel absolute shame about the negative value they bring to the world. Non-sociopaths would have felt shame and changed course when they realized they were getting rich on the mentally ill, conspiracies, misinformation, etc.

Bingo. Now good luck getting such message into heads of star-stuck young folks who dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025, when its all about money.

I work in banking, much better job than startup/faangs could offer here in Europe, at least people aren't so naive when joining. Had a discussion with my boss recently and we figured we have around 40% of management visibly falling under various sociopathic definitions. Not requirement per se but certainly helps thrive up there.

Something that has bothered me in recent times is how much more concerned people are with where they work as opposed to what they work on. I honestly believe people would design software to kill puppies and kittens so long as they could tell people they work at a Big N company.

Not to mention, I think a vast majority of the products and services that come out of these Big N companies have increasingly started to reflect this mentality each passing year and have so for the past decade or more.

I also believe those two things are correlated with genetics (and of course environment/upbringing)

For example there're studies that intelligence over 120 is negatively correlated with success as a leader.

I do think that the primary factor that can lead to billionaire status aside from luck is sort of moral flexibility / shamelessness / irrational risk tolerance above and beyond hard work and talent.

Yes, but where does this drive come from?

I haven't the faintest idea, however we can extrapolate from some facts.

One fact is that they have a lot of money. Duh... But also money is the key metric to measure success, so a lot of other people flock around those who have money so that it rubs a bit off of them, that Midas touch.

Suddenly these ultrawealthy are surrounded by an endless wave of gold diggers. The immediate thing that follows is flatter, and then echo chamber.

Now imagine that goes for years and years. Slowly this metaphorical richy's whole world views -- and also how he view himself, his identity and his relationship with the things around him -- gets tied absolutely to that notion that he is right.

For this imaginary person, losing a game isn't just am innocent loss anymore. It's a direct question of his own identity.

I think this explains a lot, but I'm not psychologist so it's just a wild guess.

That aside, I can’t be the only person tired of people bringing envy politics to this forum, trying to shoehorn wealth into every single discussion involving someone who is wealthy, as if that’s the only, or even a valid, way to look at everything they do.

Like Steve Jobs dominating the whiteboard, or Elon Musk angrily emailing in early Tesla after not being mentioned by PR at the beginning.

For me, the only thing anyone deserves is what everyone else deserves, and everything else is a form of lottery. There's simply no place for arrogance other than delusion. It's good to remember who built the foundations you've succeeded on, and if not beyond one's capacity, with a little dose of reverence, respect or something other than self immersion. Zuckerborg is a mirror for many.

> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.

> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.

Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.

Maybe it is a common trait in ambitious people.

Edits: Removed some misremembered information.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/d...

the former group probably leads the healthiest & happiest life fulfillment while pursuing their interests — i'm heavily biased though because i too fall into this category and am proud of this trait.

the latter group consists of people who either spin their wheels real hard and more often than not burn out in their pursuit of being the best, or pivot hard into something else they think they can be the best at (often repeatedly every time they encounter stronger competition) like gates & co, or in rare cases succeed in being the best even in the more competitive environment.

this last .001% are probably people whose egos get so boosted from the positive reinforcement that they become "overcompetitive" and domineering like zuck or elon, and let their egos control their power and resources to suppress competition rather than compete "fairly" ever again.

i think there's a subset of people from both main groups that may move from one into the other based on life experiences, luck, influence of people close to them, maturity, therapy, or simply wanting something different from life after a certain point. i don't have a good model for whether this is most people, or a tiny percentage.

Once it's been observed that there are bigger fish, you can't really go back to the naive sense of boundless potentiality, but you can go back to feeling like a strong and competent leader among people who benefit from and respect what you have.

Your comment focuses on the irrepressibly ambitious few who linger in the upper echelons of jet-setting academia and commerce and politics, trying to find a niche while constantly nagged by threats to their ego (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not), but there's many more Harvard/etc alum who just went back to Omaha or Baltimore or Denver or Burlington and made more or less big things happen there. That road is not so unhealthy or unhappy for them.

it is absolutely possible that after experiencing the bigger pond, people can develop purpose in their "original" pond based on values like community and relationships, or even simply dislike the vibes in bigger ponds and want to undo as much as they can. this is a super valuable thing to society and humanity for the most part, as perhaps more change can happen this way than big things happening in big places.

personally i struggle with this, because whenever i re-enter a smaller ecosystem (including/such as the one i grew up around) i feel like everyone has a distorted view of the bigger pond and self-limit themselves, which is a contagious energy i can't stand.

This pressure didn’t exist in computer science because there were plenty of tech jobs for anyone competent (not sure if that’s still true in 2025). And you didn’t need to be a genius to build something cool.

I also had a math professor who believed in extreme differences within the research community. He said only a top advisor would actually be engaging with real research and be able to bring you with them.

> More likely, get stuck a postdoc.

I still can’t understand why the outcomes for math Phds are so bad. They have extremely general intelligence which is applicable to any jobs I’ve had. I think it’s some combination of being unable to sell, unable to explain what they do, and still having their aspirations defined by professors.

Kinda reminds me of the old "amateur athlete" paradigm.

It's not that you can't get a good job with a math PhD, it's that you can't get a good job and the respect of your peers/community. I'm sure there are plenty of companies that would be thrilled to hire math PhDs, they just don't also offer a ton of opportunities to work on cutting edge (math) research and publish papers.

Paul continued to be a guitar player all his life and hosted jamming sessions in his home. I started with piano very late in my life and not very regular, but I am just happy to join the fun party.

Rachmaninoff once said, "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music." So, no matter when one starts, there would never be enough time to truly master the craft.

I believe it is better for one to start late and enjoy it than start early and burnout.

If take "What if I don't became great with this" anxiety out of the equation, it feels just more fun and life seems a little more colorful being a beginner.

Serotonin regulates dominance hierarchies and is associated with happiness. It’s so biological in nature that the same effect can be witnessed in lobsters. People or lobsters high in dominance have more serotonin and are generally happier.

Your story is not only anomalous. But it’s anomalous to the point where it’s unrealistic too. I can’t comment on this but if you did not feel the associated come down of serotonin I’m more inclined to say you’re not being honest with yourself more then you’re a biological anomaly. There’s likely enough variation in genetics to produce people like you so I’m not ruling it out.

I'm shocked that you think this is an unbelievable reaction, I know lots of people who really do think like that.

I wonder if you might find C S Lewis's lecture on the "inner ring" interesting.

https://archive.org/details/1944-the-inner-ring

Pretending that hierarchy doesn’t matter and that you don’t care where you are in that hierarchy is lying to yourself.

It’s like saying the janitor is equal in respect to the software engineer. We don’t like to admit but the janitor is less respected and looked down upon. I’m annoyed by people who pretend it doesn’t matter.

The things I find most thrilling always relate to being challenged. Finding someone better than me qualifies. Having ideas challenged or being proven wrong are the most positive experience I’ve had, especially being forced to change deeply held beliefs. I mention this because it’s one of those things that I always hear people say that everyone hates, but I’ve always felt the opposite, just from a pure chemical feeling perspective. I don’t think I could possibly be unique in that experience.

https://youtu.be/eFnV6EM-wzY?si=Nc_EqhXEFJVuQWS6

I’m not making this up. Seems like a shared personality trait among these people.

> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.

> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.

Coincidentally, I had a very similar experience, and made a similar decision to switch to software engineering. However, the irony is that I am also just a bad, if not worse, at software engineering. Oh well, not a day goes by that I regret my decision.

I think that attitude comes from people who are deeply unhappy. They need therapy.

I was blown away at the time by what was possible and that, even though he was very old at the time and had to be led out onstage by the arm, needed help getting seated, and had the guitar placed in his lap, what he could still play was so far advanced of anyone in my class who were all in attendance.

The temptation (and I have felt this many times since then after hearing various guitarists) could have been "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good." But I'm glad I didn't succumb to that and decided that "I'd rather not sound like anyone else" and still feeling pleasure and accomplishment from playing on my own terms.

My classical guitar instructor was well acquainted with Segovia, and he himself, was a student of Julian Bream. However, my instructor was without a doubt one of the most angry people I think I have ever interacted with. He was somewhat better known for his arrangements and less so as a performer.

> "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good."

I never had to think about this because my instructor would often tell me this. XD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pi7WcHqBNU - Here are some bits of wisdom from Japanese master chefs, both young and old.

Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.

There are far, far fewer of these people than you think. Lance Armstrong was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Barry Bonds was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Tom Brady was the best, and he cheated to win anyway.

Even if you believe the NFL and it was "more probable than not" that he was "generally aware" of a scheme to deflate the balls, let's not pretend that accusation is even in the same universe as what Bonds and Armstrong did

https://web.archive.org/web/20191107043435/https://static.nf...

"we have concluded that it is more probable than not that Jim McNally (the Officials Locker Room attendant for the Patriots) and John Jastremski (an equipment assistant for the Patriots) participated in a deliberate effort to release air from Patriots game balls after the balls were examined by the referee

...

Our consultants confirmed that a reduction in air pressure is a natural result of footballs moving from a relatively warm environment such as a locker room to a colder environment such as a playing field. According to our scientific consultants, however, the reduction in pressure of the Patriots game balls cannot be explained completely by basic scientific principles, such as the Ideal Gas Law, based on the circumstances and conditions likely to have been present on the day of the AFC Championship Game. In addition, the average pressure drop of the Patriots game balls exceeded the average pressure drop of the Colts balls ...

...

Based on the testing and analysis, however, Exponent concluded that, within the range of likely game conditions and circumstances studied, they could identify no set of credible environmental or physical factors that completely accounts for the Patriots halftime measurements or for the additional loss in air pressure exhibited by the Patriots game balls, as compared to the loss in air pressure exhibited by the Colts game balls. Dr. Marlow agreed with this conclusion. This absence of a credible scientific explanation for the Patriots halftime measurements tends to support a finding that human intervention may account for the additional loss of pressure exhibited by the Patriots balls."

Apply the phrase to the staff member he lost to, and the situation makes sense. The staff member wants to win the real game (of remaining a high-salary Facebook employee), and will throw an otherwise inconsequential game of Catan to maintain that position's security.

Have you ever seen a succession struggle in eg any old monarchy?

In communism the system says there are no winners. Everything needs to be fair.

Please feel free to point to the real world exception, because I can't find it.

But they were only exception in the lame technical sense that you didn't have a single 'guy at the top' in charge, but a sharing of power by eg something like the Politburo.

I'm glad you take them at their word. May I interest you in some beach front property?

In any case, there's plenty more systems than just these two.

Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.

The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.

>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer

https://www.hgreer.com/PlayingInTheCreek/

I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.

Money is a means to an end.

Maybe Zuckerberg has a lack of self reflection?

Downside is I obviously don't use that free time to do anything I'm not already skilled at, like art or music or writing or exercise (except for rock climbing which I manage to not be competitive at)

This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.

Bill Gates may be competitive, but this specific event, and the whole idea that it somehow represents a shift, is completely unrelated to the current topic. People have different private and public personas, and even present different personas to different people. This is completely normal, and often the only way to cope with being a celebrity, especially for introverted personality types.

Speaking of which, if you watch the (nearly) full interview[1] instead of that 5 second clip, you'll realize that the chair jumping bit had nothing to do with the reason he walked out of that interview. I couldn't find the full version, but you can see that towards the end he gets annoyed at the constant prodding to get him to admit some wrongdoing. The entire segment is made to portray him as some out-of-touch rich guy and tyrant that abuses his employees and competitors. Just poor television all around, more interested in promoting sensationalism for engagement purposes, than showing an honest image of the person. The chair jumping bit is proof of this, given that it's the only thing the public remembers.

Extrapolating that bit to make some grand assumption about his personality is beyond ridiculous.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgwHIwEwGLQ

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-board-game-c...

I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.

Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.

That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said. Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?

But at this point it would be hard to say that Zuck is not a toxic individual. Not everyone is toxic.

I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No."

Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word.

People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it.

We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.

They own a mansion and a yacht (Bugs Bunny reference).

But you are correct. Different orbit from the ultra-wealthy. They still hang out with plebes like me.

However, if this happens to these folks, then you can bet that it also happens to the next valence level.

"Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.

I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.

But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.

It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.

Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.

I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.

But the idea of honor itself was a necessity for most of history, when there was no central government to enforce contracts, punish violence, etc. Your reputation was one of the only protections you had. Whether your family was known to exact revenge to those that wronged you or as weak pushovers would affect someone’s decision to kill one of you, steal your things, or make a deal with you and keep everything for themselves.

You had to show that anything someone could gain at your expense would be outweighed by your commitment to take more back in revenge.

And social norms at the time were to take them hostage and ransom them back to their family or allied higher lord if possible, so their chances of surviving a lost battle were much higher than that of the men they were leading. So even in this context they are already figuring out "ways to address the downsides."

Vs the like, the normal people who would also be called on to die in battle, but then the rest of the time would be living under the capricious and frequently violent rule of these certainly-no-more-than-average-emotionally-secure men with more or less unchecked power over their daily lives.

What we have now developed from what they had then and a lot of the dynamics are quite similar. The violence is more abstract but that's exactly what the current crop of tech billionaires is trying to change.

There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention.

Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side.

"Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."

Source: https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-his-men-civil-mili...

Lots of historical echos in the state of the world today.

I'm not convinced there has ever been a positive or constructive outcome from cults of personality.

This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim.

Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk.

The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.

So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.

My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.

There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind.

The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't.

But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.

Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards.

Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.

There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.

It seems like there must be another component, but maybe it is just that simple.

I used to play games to win, but now I play games to maximize the collective enjoyment of playing the game. This shift began with my spouse (who is a very sore loser) but continued with my children. I still let them lose sometimes because I want them to know how to enjoy a losing game, but I (selfishly) want them to enjoy games as much as I do, so that's my focus, and I will play to lose (as non-obviously as possible) frequently.

When I play games against good players now, I notice that I've lost a lot of skill in the kind of strategic ruthlessness required to win. I found this surprising, because playing in a way where you're trying to "fix" the outcomes for other players and modulate the mood of the game based on outcomes still requires a great deal of strategic insight and clever play. I guess the additional attention to the social and emotional dynamics must naturally reduce focus. It's kind of a shame, because you can't maximize enjoyment with a skilled player without being skilled, but I suppose the trade off is that there will always be more unskilled players who can benefit from enjoyment maximizing play than skilled players who will suffer from subpar opponents. Naturally, skilled players are already getting a lot out of the game, or else they wouldn't be playing enough to become skilled.

Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.

It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.

That sounds more like a cult than a company.

I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.

To paraphrase McBain's answer to "how do you sleep at night?"

"On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO0JaecRWy0

I visited the FB campus ~2015 on the invitation of some former colleagues that worked there. It felt very culty at the time and I left with the vague feeling that I always got when I left the house of my spoiled and over-privileged friend that I had in grade school. How they were working with the scale of data that they had to deal with was very cool, though.

The alternatives usually involve a threat of more uncertainty or misery.

But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.

They could, though. It's just that they likely would have to do something more involved than depriving them of their contracts, which is often enough to get rid of the problem and unlike an aristocracy where bloodlines and births set limits there are now institutions that produce replacements 'at scale'.

Likewise running a company. You guys are, to be blunt, freaks. It requires very particular psychological and social conditioning to be in that place doing that thing, it demands specific types of personality traits and adaptations, and that probably doesn't make you, the successful CEO, a well-balanced, "normal" person.

Now take that person, who is a little bit alien in the first place, and ask what happens when they can choose everything about their surroundings, when they get fitted for their GERDpod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtV33YSKOJk . They still have the same personality quirks, traumas and experiences that got them to this place, but now they're rich beyond imagining, every whim trivially achievable except power over other people (and that only minimally constrained). Like a person stuck in a perpetual state of orgasm, the question of whether they like it or not and really isn't relevant to whether we're going to be inviting them to the cookout or how they're going to behave in church. Any interaction, they're going to make it weird. Because they're weird. Their situation is weird, and the mentality that brought them to that situation is independently weird. A normal person would have pursued normal fulfilling things in life, and they chose entrepreneurial ambition.

It's often the same underlying trait that gives someone qualities that we like/admire but also the qualities we don't like.

When we evaluate each other, we sometimes have thoughts like "she has <good quality>, but if only she'd work on <bad quality>".

Over the years I finally realized that's not how we work. Our traits aren't always connected to isolated levers that we can pull independently.

The really good sales guy might exaggerate fibs in personal convo. The girl that moved from Germany to Mexico to start a successful hostel also has a hard impulsiveness that's hard to get along with. The really attentive mother is risk-averse to a point of absurdity. All examples of friends off the top of my head. Or me: I can find happiness anywhere that I am (good), but it also means I don't have the drive to rock the boat when I should (bad).

There doesn't necessarily exist the possibility of preserving the good part if you were to fix the bad part since the fix might require changing the underlying trait.

Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.

EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.

Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.

Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.

They might be, sure. But we shouldn't assume it.

Melon should fire his!

There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.

To get where they are, they need to be quite smart, competitive, and ruthless.

As soon as they succeed, they become magnets to yes-men and people trying to ride their coat-tails.

So you end up in a position where the majority will ask "how high?" when you tell them to jump, and who will never question you.

Do that for a couple of decades, and something has to change - psychologically. You become condition to it.

Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.

The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.

It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.

It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.

What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.

Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.

They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.

The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.

Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure.

I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well.

Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.

It makes sense, media glamorizes these people and amplifies their actions, and some of the insecure folks crave attention. Look at that one guy who somehow works harder than all of us but is able to tweet all day every day...

Not that this means we're wrong, exactly.

We all have a price really.

But even for a slightly wiser billionaire who does what you suggest - they wouldn't do that unless they knew they would get public hate, and were bothered by it. You don't have a thick bubble unless you understand that you need it.

I've known a few people in the hundreds and millions of dollars in wealth category and that seemed to be their go to response when anyone had to say anything negative about their behaviors.

In the US at least, never underestimate the amount of calvinism and prosperity gospel that has creeped into every facet of our lives.

Losing at a board game forces them to confront the fact that they aren't any more clever than their peers. They didn't get to where they were on their wits alone; they started the game with a few routes already developed.

It can also be unsettling to know that, just as easily as you killed off competitors, competitors could unseat you.

So yea, you might sleep a bit easier at night if you can just win at the things you can control, like that darn Settlers of Catan game.

Also someone who reflexively accuses the other of cheating while playing a game likely has a hard time admitting they failed at something. Not an admirable trait in a leader.

> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day

https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888

It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.