Your point about genius and success is well-taken, but the reality is even more complicated. There is a strong feedback loop between people believing you're a genius and success, not just one-way causation.
Convince a few influential people you're a genius and the odds of your success goes up. Then as you become more successful, the threshold for convincing people you are a genius goes down.
It can even happen posthumously: Herman Melville was a nobody loser when he died. A few decades later his work was "discovered" and he became a genius overnight.
Bootstrapping this process is an unsolved problem, although the kind of blatant self-marketing that characterizes Jobs or Edison certainly helps (although self-marketing still has to be backed with actual capabilities, as it was in those cases.)
Convince a few influential people you're a genius and the odds of your success goes up. Then as you become more successful, the threshold for convincing people you are a genius goes down.
It can even happen posthumously: Herman Melville was a nobody loser when he died. A few decades later his work was "discovered" and he became a genius overnight.
Bootstrapping this process is an unsolved problem, although the kind of blatant self-marketing that characterizes Jobs or Edison certainly helps (although self-marketing still has to be backed with actual capabilities, as it was in those cases.)