Fifth type is when do something crappy but then someone else looks at it and for whatever reason they think it's great.

The older I get, the bigger I think category 5 actually is.

That's good marketing.

That's so true, why bother doing great work, which is a lot of work, when you can get the credit of many people doing it?

That's what Elon Musk has done since the start of his career and it has worked pretty well for him. For that you need to be a really good hype man because it's objectively true that great work that nobody knows about is pure waste. You need to be rich because in the US it's assumed that this means something awesome about you personally. You need to be the one who always announce the news on Twitter, you don't even have to lie, your strongest fan will assume you did all the work. Like they believe he is the founder of Tesla. Like they believe he is the real life Tony Stark. Like they believe that he, not the actual rocket scientists working at Tesla, design all those rockets. Like they believe that he invented the hyperloop when he renamed the vactrain concept from hundred years ago and then couldn't build it because it's bullshit. Like they believe he will save humanity by helping us anytime soon to escape Earth that people like him are destroying.

I don't really care about Elon Musk. The guy is a mix between a Tech Robber Baron and an emotionally immature 14 years old who has read too much science fiction. And remember more the fiction than the science.

OTOH his fan club is a fascinating experiment on how a cult of personality develops in public and in real time.

I work in the aerospace industry and know several current and former senior engineers at SpaceX. None of them would agree with your assessment that Musk has done no meaningful work for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer incapable of valuable work.

I don't disagree with your read on his lack of maturity, or that he takes credit for work he hasn't done, or that his fans believe he is singularly responsible for the accomplishments of his teams. However, it's odd that Musk is so obsessively hated. I believe his passionate detractors are under a similar polarizing spell as his passionate fans, only in the opposite direction of "hero worship".

I'm not talking about Musk, it may be hard to believe, but I genuinely don't care about him. He is the current guy with too much money, fame and ego.

I'm talking about his fans and their perceptions of Musk. They hear "he is the real life Tony Stark" and they think "WOW" instead of Tony Stark is a character of fiction that can't possibly exist in reality".

Absurdity is fascinating to me.

I'm talking about the fan perception of Musk.

For example Jordan Peterson went on stage to say somethink (not exact quote) like: "Elon Musk wow. He wanted to built an electric car which is basically impossible and yet he went on, nobody thought he would be possible and he went on to fouund Tesla and now it works".

In real life though the first electric car was invented in 1881, because electricity and fossil fuels have always been the two obvious sources of energy for making a car.

Elon Musk wasn't the founder of Tesla, he bought it. He played a role sure. But obviously, painfully so, he didn't do the Tesla engineering alone. Tesla in fact pays shitloads of engineers to do the engineering. And Tesla is just one company making electric cars. Elon Musk brought the hype, the money, sometimes the right decisions, sometimes the wrong decisions, sometimes the toxic workplace. And he got lots of money from big government.

And sociology taught us you don't have to be rich when you start your career. But that it sure helps a lot when you have no shortage of money, good education, you are a dude, your mother tongue is english, you know the right people, you are an illegal alien but that's okay because you come from a white supremacist country, and you happen to be here during the california gold rush, I mean the silicon valley in the 90s.

When you check all those boxes, you are much more likely to become a "self made man"

To flip that on its head, most people who do great work do it explicitly for someone else. Or put another way: you can build equity for yourself, or you can build equity for someone else.

sometimes that depends on circumstance how easy or hard that decision is, for example if you got pocket emeralds as allowance from your parents when you were a teenager it might be easier to have means and agency to build equity for yourself, whereas if you were literally a medieval serf born into a fief then it might be harder to make this decision to build equity for yourself maybe you will have to revolt

I think some of the fan phenomenon is just how much money he has, although of course that's not the only thing. Like if he plans to spend all his money over the next decade (probably he doesn't) and he doesn't make any more money or interest, then if you can get one single second of his financial attention, then that is worth like a thousand dollars, so of course anyone like that will be swarmed by so many people.

It's not obvious that this must happen actually. Bernard Arnault is as rich and sometimes richer than Elon Musk. But there is no big Bernard Arnault cult in France. He is recognized as a very efficient business shark but not worshipped. It's all about cultural relationship to money, and France and the US have a quite different relationship to money, although they have in common that it's a werid relationship to money.