Money. He's successful because he's obscenely wealthy by birth and gets to buy and take credit for whatever he wants and nobody can stop him. It's literally as simple as that.
I disagree, there’s still something surprising about how wealthy he became. There’s surely people who grew up as privileged/wealthy as him, are smarter and more mature, but didn’t end up as wealthy in the end. Genuinely curious what separates them from each other. The best answer I can think of is he just got lucky.
He was rich enough to have a good start and the ability to make some fuck-ups before he got lucky and hit a jackpot. Then after that, he became the level of rich that has lawyers and accountants who know how to make it faster than he could spend it and who know how to grift more of it from the gubmint.
For awhile, I think, he also had people around him with good heads on their shoulders who mitigated his damage, but like any 800-lb gorilla, you can only feed it so many bananas before it gets big enough to demand the ho-hos with growth hormones in them and smashes its banana-handlers to get to them. His first wife seemed a decent sort and down-to-earth, but once they split, he had fewer and fewer guard rails.
But he's also had several years to perform a shit-ton of cause-and-effect testing and measure the effect of his social media presence and public statements on his companies, and he developed a good instinct (the same way a raccoon figures out what a trash can is and how to open it) of the reach of his influence. Especially once he got hold of the internal metrics by buying a social media platform. He buys attention but he knows the exchange rate between dollars and attention in an attention-based economy.
What separates the others from him is sociopathy and narcissism. Either the not-so-well-off ones aren't as sociopathic or they're not as huge of a malignant narcissist as he is.
And there's a possibility that some of them have a person who is big enough/important enough to them that that person can take them to the woodshed for a come-to-Jesus when their money is outpacing their reality.
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u/Ande64 1d ago
Money. He's successful because he's obscenely wealthy by birth and gets to buy and take credit for whatever he wants and nobody can stop him. It's literally as simple as that.