There are far more people who tried crazy ideas and failed, and are promptly forgotten. The whole point of survivorship bias is that you have to be cognizant of the data points that failed and therefore aren't recorded, not just the ones that survived and are recorded.

According to this: https://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/us-entrepreneurship-reach... there are 27 million entrepreneurs in the the US. That's a large enough number that even if the chances of each individual entrepreneur having a big hit is just a few percentage points, then there are bound to be many entrepreneur who have multiple successive big hits. Especially considering how many people who are even tangentially related to a successful startup describe themselves a founder or co-founder, resulting in the padding of the success rate.

My point being is that we can't rule out the possibility of it all being luck or mostly being luck. Sure, it legitimately could be skill, but there is no way to know for sure, at least currently.

> "all being luck or mostly being luck"

Seriously? What, he flipped a coin a million times which determined what he's going to do next? How are you defining "luck"?

Not the OP, but the point of survivor bias is that there were 10 million people flipping coins for the first "moonshot" idea, and let's say 1000 succeeded; then those tossed the coin for the second moonshot and only 1 succeeded. Was the one who succeeded so much better than the other 1000, or mostly luckier?

But my point is that he didn't flip thousands of coins. He made thousands of calculated decisions. His thousands of decisions resulted in success. Others, with their own thousands of decisions did not. I don't see the "luck" here.

The point is, if enough of people are making decisions, success is not sufficient to distinguish a "calculated decision" from a lucky one.

I get the point, but it's ridiculous. It's like monkeys on a typewriter coming up with Shakespeare. Sure, it's theoretically possible, but the odds are incomprehensibly small based on luck alone. If a monkey did write that prose, it's probably a pretty special monkey. Likewise, Elon is a pretty special monkey too.

He took thousands of calculated risks. Lots of those calculated risks didn't pay off, you can be sure. But enough of them did. There are no Übermenschen.

I'm not saying he's the greatest person of all time, or even the smartest, but he's demonstrably one of the best at getting very large high risk projects off the ground and building tons of support for them. That's not luck.