Good engineering is a team effort. Engineers unwilling to listen because of some self-percieved superiority complex are bad at that. And they hardly get any better.
I don't mean to defend snobishness, but it is possible to be in the top 10% of your field and dismiss anybody not in the top 30% of your field. That comes across as arrogant and dismissive to almost everybody because it is. But it doesn't mean you can't work in a team of equals.
Somebody like Anish Giri might be a very good sport and play a (very short) game of chess with me, but I doubt he would expect to learn anything from it. Of course, he probably wouldn't waste his time on me. Either way, he would still be a great asset to help somebody like Ian Nepomniachtchi prepare for a tournament.
Of course, being considerate and welcoming to everybody all the time is super awesome. Those who manage it have my respect whether they are perceived as the best in their field or not.
> it is possible to be in the top 10% of your field and dismiss anybody not in the top 30% of your field
This is how the 10% end up with 5 jobs in 8 years, watching those who they thought were beneath them rise up and take leadership positions because they're too much of a pain in the ass to work with.
It's a particular kind of intelligence. I'm actually in a relationship with somebody who tends to lean this direction. If you know what you're dealing with it's not too burdensome.
What's happening is, you have a person (Elon) of exceptional intelligence, so they can recognize a thing or concept and instantly follow it out to rational conclusions faster than the people around them, but they have not developed their intuitive side and don't respect the empty part, the unknown part, of the problem space.
It's like that halting problem thing: they become so accustomed to being able to see 'the answer' that they get blind to the mystery, the ambiguity of the non-answers and the areas where a real innovation will come from. They're not surprised by anything, or surprisable, so they become a specific kind of intelligent, very very quick and correct.
If you're a designer/inventor/artist type person you rely much more heavily on the non-answer spaces because those are where you work. That's not Elon. He has people for that, and takes the credit for their work, and impresses them so much with his ability to be quick that they go right along with it. In real terms they could not get their stuff done without him as that ringleader, figurehead, the 'Mr. Outside' there to impress the masses and get them to give him their money. It's a symbiotic relationship and Elon has done that over and over.
Don't look to Elon personally to have the revolutionary idea. However, if you show him one, he may well see where it leads way quicker than you do… and take it, and make a business out of it, and then hire you and have you doing it whilst taking a big cut of what you earn from it.
In this way Elon 'gets' capitalism as well and quickly as he gets everything else. He's definitely the man for late stage capitalism.
This is a pretty good observation IMO. I've always wondered why his timelines are so ridiculous. It jives with what you said because maybe he looks at current state and can follow it to the end state but misses the unknowns in-between. The devil is always in the details. But i would expect that of someone relatively new to the job of GettingThingsDone and Musk has been doing this for a long time. I can't get my head around why his timelines are so outside the realm of reality. Any date he gives i just mentally ignore because it's wildly unreliable.
