# How does someone with no business acumen get to be the richest person in the world?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [November 14, 2022, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903 "2022-11-14T19:46:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 155

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**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2022, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/155 "2022-11-21T21:05:55Z")

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> [@CookingWithGas](#):
>
> If you have enough well-funded people out there trying random shit, some of them might succeed without any particular skill. Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. One way to tell the difference is consistent success over the long run.

And even then, given enough trials, it’s statistically inevitable that at least a few people will be consistently successful over the long run due merely to random chance. Like those stock-picker apps that accomplish amazing feats of consistently selecting profitable stocks, by the simple expedient of selecting many more stock combinations and merely not mentioning the ones that didn’t turn out so profitable.

I’m not a CEO or a business analyst, and I have no specialized knowledge or opinion about whether or to what extent Elon Musk (or Donald Trump, for that matter) may happen to combine their frequent public acts of undeniable stupidity with some form of above-average executive ability or “business acumen” that makes them very financially successful. But what I do know is that there are a lot of rich people of varying levels of wealth engaged in various business operations, all of which are subject to some degree of random chance and luck. Just because a few of them are repeatedly successful doesn’t necessarily imply that they’re business geniuses. Maybe their success could be partly or mostly due to their encountering highly improbable, but statistically inevitable, unusually long sequences of lucky breaks.

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