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Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.
Why the ultra rich get rich, explained in two charts | Brian Klaas
Big Think
9 minutes
6 days ago
Why the ultra rich get rich, explained in two charts | Brian Klaas
**💸 The Genius Myth: Why Billionaires Aren’t Always Brilliant**
We’ve been sold a lie — that extreme wealth is the mark of genius. But when you peel back the layers, you find that **luck, not talent**, is often the true engine behind billionaire success.
While talent follows a normal curve — nobody is *a billion times more talented* than anyone else — **wealth doesn’t follow the same rules**. It’s wildly uneven, with a few sitting on astronomical fortunes and many scraping by. This disconnect points to something else at play: **luck striking in the middle of the talent curve**, not at the extremes.
A striking study simulating a world with randomly distributed talent and random events found that the **richest individuals weren’t the most talented** — just marginally above average people who got lucky again and again. Real-world outcomes echo this.
**Enter Elon Musk.** Sure, he has some talent — but he's also a prime example of someone who mistook wealth for genius. His Twitter/X debacle revealed that success in one domain doesn’t guarantee competence elsewhere. The myth of his infallible intellect unraveled when **his “genius” failed to translate across industries**.
But there’s another trait common to billionaires: **greed**. Unlike most people who might be content with enough, many billionaires obsessively chase more. It’s not just brilliance or even luck — it’s an insatiable hunger that propels them to hoard wealth, not distribute it.
So the next time someone equates riches with brilliance, remember: **lightning didn’t strike them because they were the tallest tree — it struck where there were just more trees.**
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Big Think
Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.
