No, this is ridiculous. It would sound ridiculous applied to any, more legible skill. Nobody is out there saying “it’s impossible to know whether I could shoot 3s better than Lebron James or perform open heart surgery better than a surgeon or sing better than Taylor Swift”. We correctly clock that anyone trying to make those arguments are confidently, ignorantly delusional.
But because the average intellectual prides themselves on their ignorance of the actual realities of building and running businesses, we’re allowed to entertain a fantasy world where CEOing is just a laughably trivial set of activities and only by luck or deceit does anyone get there and it’s always undeserved.
We have empirical numbers of how many people wash out at every step of the process and how gruelling the path to the top is. We feel perfectly fine making fun of terrible CEOs for their “obvious incompetence” without fully appreciating that even the very worst CEOs got there by far exceeding their peers throughout multiple rounds of selection. It’s like when shows take the very worst NBA player and match them up against some guy who thinks he’s “pretty good” amongst his friend group and it quickly becomes obvious that the two are simply playing different games and it’s like watching a toddler play keepaway against an adult.
(For context, I’ve previously written about what the skill of CEOs are and why CEOs are the way they are).
Yes, blah blah luck and yes, blah blah, Musk today has a laughably trivial workload and is largely kept away from his companies but that doesn’t exclude Noah Smith’s very basic point which is that the average person could no more build SpaceX and Tesla tomorrow than they could climb Mount Everest or swim the English Channel or build a quantum computer, it’s something that straightforwardly requires training and skill and discipline.