I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.
Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much.
On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely.
I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more.
They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them.
I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept.
People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.
It’s not true for the extreme top end: [0]
Here’s a Yahoo Finance article citing several efforts to investigate inheritance vs self-made wealth in the upper middle class: [1]
We keep electing new politicians and buying the latest and greatest thing. Technology keeps revolutionizing everything.
This leads to a ton of churn at the top as incumbents are replaced.
What may fool you though is that all successful people are similar in important ways (Anna Karenina principle). But they are not the same people.
[0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/all-billion...
The article you linked was a bit fuzzy, seems they counted people like Thiel and Musk as 'entrepreneurs' rather than inheritance because they didn't keep running a family company. But them being wealthy is absolutely connected to their families being privileged and the nasty, nasty crimes they profited from.
Having a leg up due to coming from a well-off background invalidates nothing. These top entrepreneurs and politicians typically grew up upper-middle class or as members of the minor rich; they rise to positions of prominence from there.
That’s fundamentally different from inheriting power even if you’re a dunce as kings once did.
Today he's also a fascist grifter who's entered into politics. For some reason usians don't revolt when their political system elects rapists, genocidaires and people on the far right, so I'm hoping it'll turn into something like a kingdom that they find it in themselves to overturn.
Today?
He incessantly spews anti-inspirational anti-rational anti-social and anti-business diarrhea to an alarming and epic degree. He drives Twitter/X’s business logic like a drunk going the wrong way on a highway, seemingly intent on hitting every guardrail he can find.
So far SpaceX and perhaps to a lesser degree Tesla are getting by on the deep talent he gathered in better times.
He is an unusual person.
Both Tesla and SpaceX are military labs behind plausible deniability, dual-use aprons. Hence they're run to a larger extent by people who aren't him and he works like a neat distraction for outsiders.
Much like Thiel he doesn't show any "deep talent". That's something other people are bringing to the organisations they're part of.
Dramatic exits after successful acquisitions are common. You have to earn “failures” like that.
That created SpaceX’s seed capital.
(You can’t have it both ways. If he had convinced the US to bankroll him, that would have been serious business acumen.)
Minor success on hard problems, with a shoe string budget, and an attractive business plan (vertical integration, fast-failure iteration, reusability) got investment capital flowing.
More successes, more capital.
Result: They changed the economics of space launches & save money for all their customers, including NASA & the military.
No resemblance to nepo operations or results. See Boeing, Lockheed, etc.
$ billions of dollars burn with each SLS launch. Massive delays & cost plus overruns. For now.
There's been a lot of reporting about how SpaceX is keeping Musk's influence at a minimum. If you go looking you'll also find video from interviews with Musk in that role where he isn't talking from a script and comes across as a clueless high schooler.
Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?