Why Are Billionaires Often Stupid? – CleanTechnica

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In the US, and across much of the world, we have a tendency to idolize the super rich, and we tend to think billionaires must be really smart. In many cases, billionaires may have primarily borrowed money, put it into certain projects or ventures, and then ripped people off. There’s a pretty heavy amount of fraud happening across the billionaire class. Of course, some billionaires also had genius ideas and implemented them well, reaping the vast financial rewards. And, something that should really not be discounted, a number of billionaires got to their financial station in life by obsessing over one or two narrow topics and riding that obsession to the top of a hot new market.

The idea for this article came while listening to this discussion about Manchester United, but not only from that of course. If you’re unfamiliar, Manchester United is one of the biggest football (aka soccer) clubs in the world. You probably know that, but the parts you are probably not aware of unless you follow the sport closely are as follows:

• For a long period of time, Manchester United was the most successful football club in the world.
• However, that time period is long over, and the club has been a bit of shambles since then — sliding down further and further in multiple regards.
• A billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, recently bought a big share of the club and was gifted the task of controlling/running it in order to try to get things back on track after too many years of neglect by a primarily disengaged ownership family.
• Ratcliffe has made some big changes in the past few months in charge … but they seem to have been even worse than what was happening before, and the club is more of a disaster right now than ever before.
• It’s truly gotten to clownish levels this week.

What is happening there is interesting for many reasons, but a big one is that many people assumed Ratcliffe would come in and because of his business success and billionaire status would do everything in a really smart, effective way. That was all the hype for months. He was a childhood Manchester United fan and he was very smart because he’s a billionaire, so he’d surely turn things around. So far, it’s been the opposite, and many of the decisions have been shocking, which got me wondering tonight — why are billionaires often stupid?

Before I get into that, though, there’s the obvious other reference to make as it regards cleantech. Billionaire Elon Musk has made countless clueless statements in the past couple of years, and he made more yesterday about climate change. I would like to say that this shocks me, but it just doesn’t any more. I once thought Musk was a genius on all kinds of topics. What I’ve learned, though, is he’s got really uninformed, simplistic, and ridiculously false ideas on a number of topics — on many topics. I’ve seen him make downright stupid statements about climate change (starting a long time ago), city planning, political conspiracy theories, economics, social psychology, scientific fields he’s not involved in, and much more. So, I’m sure all of this fed into the question in the headline.

There are three problems that I think billionaires tend to have that make them stupid or make them seem stupid.

First of all, they have the tendency to assume that because they are billionaires, because they succeeded at the financial game of life, they are much smarter than most people. They assume their assumptions are probably correct, instead of having the humility and self-restraint to not jump to conclusions on every hunch they have.

Perhaps that’s actually normal even for non-billionaires. But the second thing that I think most of us will agree is a contributing factor is that some billionaires (or most of them?) surround themselves with “yes men,” and they have the power to carry out more of their off-the-cuff ideas and dreams. People they hire are more prone to saying everything that comes out of their mouth is genius, or at least something worth doing. Not only that — there are often teams of people hired to carry out the whims of their billionaire bosses. “Yes, boss, great idea — I’ll go buy that company for you.” Just in the two examples above, we’ve got: 1) Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a chemical engineer who is at times the richest person in the UK thanks to the fact that he founded chemicals group INEOS in 1998, buying Manchester United and somehow running it worse than the Glazer family was; and 2) Elon Musk, who recently bought Twitter and has turned it into a much less valuable garbage fire. It appears neither of them was equipped at all to run these companies, but, surrounded by “yes men,” they were encouraged to buy them and have been encouraged to go along with stupid ideas many steps along the way.

Thirdly, you’ve got a point I made above, that many billionaires are billionaires because they focused obsessively on one or two topics for a long time. It seems these come into play with both Ratcliffe (chemical engineering) and Musk (rocket ships and electric cars). To put so much of your time and mental energy into a couple of topics, you don’t leave much to educate yourself about other matters and develop, over time, decent understanding and knowledge on a variety of topics. You become something very different from a “Renaissance man.” It’s the opportunity and the downfall of our modern era — extreme specialization leads to success, but then makes people powerful who don’t have broad enough experience to rule wisely.

Pulling it all together, people who think they’re much smarter than they are, who are surrounded by “yes men” and have the resources to get these people to do almost anything for them, and who lack broad education and experience due to long-term obsession over one or two topics are prone to saying stupid things, doing stupid things, and shocking the world with how stupid they can be after achieving so much business success. Buyer beware — not every sales pitch is honest and complete.

Anyway, with regard to Manchester United, I’ll continue to enjoy the club’s stumbles, as it’s been my least favorite club since its dominance in the 1990s. With regard to Elon Musk, his lack of knowledge on many topics, and his vast spreading of misinformation and incorrect hunches, man, it’s hard to know what to do with that. Even on basic matters of climate change, he is somehow so ill informed and incorrect. He loves to simplify topics as quickly as possible, but it seems that has led to not learning nearly enough about how the climate is changing and the risks that poses for us — today, in 5 years, and in 25 years.

Featured image: photo of Elon Musk by CleanTechnica; photo of Jim Ratcliffe by The CBI (CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 license)