It's hard to determine the value of many (great?) ideas from the start. hence we have various ways of idea risk management: customer development(for market risk), prototyping(for technical risk) and market research(which is the weakest form usually, for market risk).
Ideas passed through this methods are worth much more, but still most of them can be copied without good execution.
His one-liner was "ideas are worthless", and "great ideas are worth their weight in gold". I interpreted the latter as "great ideas are worth zero".
So unless I misinterpreted the last part, his comment was the first with witty put downs.
Good ideas are valuble and worthwhile. And it may take many years of hard work to come up with them. This is why the patent system was created: to allow people who come up with these ideas to have them valued as worthwhile, and compensated as such.
I understand there are some people who just have an idea that is shallow, and then do nothing with it. But the original comment said all ideas were worthless.
Worth their weight in gold is a common way of saying that something is very valuable.
Are you an Aspie? You're being far too clever/literal, reading too much into his statement with your weight of a great idea = 0 therefore worth = 0 calculation.
The natural and much easier interpretation of what he wrote is that good ideas are common as muck, whereas great ideas are of great worth.
You really have to go through some quite unnatural contortions to arrive at the conclusion you did; that he said all ideas are worthless.
BUT
You may be right, he may have been trying to have some subtle play with words. If so, I apologise. However, it isn't the way his statement would normally be read.
