this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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My point is that they aren't making mistakes. They're not attempting A but doing B because they don't know any better. What they are doing is intentional and very often successful.
That doesn’t make them intelligent, and you need to re-read my comment until you understand just how many failures these people experience that they can simply ignore. In many ways you could even argue that what they’re doing isn’t intentional, they’re just reacting in the moment and we can all see how the furthest they can really look ahead is about a couple days.
Look at Musk, there have literally been whole teams of people who made it their job to distract the stupid child so he couldn’t fuck up their company. Jeff Bezos is making terrible decisions and his creativity was “bookstore but online”, yet it looks like success the same way a toddler with a shotgun will get all the cookies they want.
“Intentional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. These are some of the dumbest, most over-confident people alive right now and they are nothing without their ability to ignore major financial failures.
And yet they’re seemingly untouchable while their opposition flails around and impotently shakes their fists. Great, they’re dumb and overconfident- they’re still seemingly doing exactly what they need to do in order to “win” and rub everyone else’s nose in it.
If decent people were half as interested in stopping these shitheads as they are in reassuring themselves of their intellectual superiority, the Altmans and Musks of the world might actually have something to fear.
I don’t get the use of “and yet” here. They untouchable because they exist in a system that supports them and has supported them since monarchies were a thing and probably before. They didn’t setup an intricate series of protections, we just willingly gave them a handful of grenades and now we have to, or feel we have to, dance around them whenever they have a temper tantrum so they don’t blow us all up. It’s the same mentality behind “too big to fail” where we could super easily actually let them fail or otherwise punish them but unfortunately we also elected similarly moronic and selfish people to be in charge and they want to pretend that they’ve been fooled or forced to cede to the rich.
Bezos did more than that. He started with "bookstore but online" because it forced Amazon to develop a low-cost, efficient logistics capability that could then be applied to a lot of things besides books.
And as Amazon was growing, Bezos mandated that the Amazon's internal IT infrastructure was built out with APIs that would allow it to be monetized in the future. And that's where AWS came from.
Again, I'm not saying he's a good person. Far from it. It's just that, from a corporate strategy point of view, he actually had strategies that he stuck to, and they paid off. And everyone makes mistakes in business. It's how you recover from them and persevere that makes the difference.
Musk, on the other hand, is much more in the toddler-with-shotgun category.
Does that make Bezos special? The bar is so low that someone doing the bare minimum of what most regular people are actively for is somehow an intelligent thing. His big thing to make money was to undercut local bookstores, that’s what he really did, and even that wasn’t new.
His “income” is around $2,500 per second. He “makes” more than most people do in a lifetime in a matter of minutes(single digit minutes) and what you described is not anything that requires special intelligence to pull off. What made him special was a silver spoon and the willingness to hurt others for personal gain.
Even Steve Jobs’ main quality that made him a standout leader in so many ways was that he simply allowed the people to he was paying to do a job to do that job without being micro-managed, and he told people who tried to get him to chase short-term gains to fuck off. Again, not genius level stuff unless you’re comparing him against the truly stupid and evil, which is most rich people.