Often thinking about extreme outliers including billionaires makes me think of park ranger Roy Sullivan who according to Guiness World Records is the person struck by lightening more recorded times than any other human being. 7 times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan

After the fourth time, Sullivan apparently started carrying around a can of water in his car at all times because his hair always caught on fire when being struck. He also started believing that a force was trying to harm him through lightening strikes and would potentially pick him out even if he was in a crowd of people.

Pretty much anyone can acknowledge that believing in such a force, or carrying around a can of water in case they get struck by lightening again is not reasonable behavior. Extremely rare events (and sequences of events) happen all the time. Given an infinite number of distinct, equally likely outcomes, all outcomes approach a probability of zero, yet one of them will still happen.

Sullivan was of course struck by lightening again a few more times, one of which he apparently even used his can of water to dose out the lightening-induced fire in his hair.

Statistically Sullivan is anomolous even considering his highly increased likelihood of being struck as a park ranger in an area prone to thunderstorms.

Unsurprisingly Sullivan was deeply psychologically affected, became reclusive out of a fear of being struck again, and eventually died by suicide.

If your personal lived experience is the freakish outlier, there is an entirely rational perspective to view the world in a different way. To see coincidences in your life not as coincidence, but as something intrinsic to you. That is how we identify patterns in ourselves — strengths and weaknesses.

I think often for billionaires, they are Roy Sullivan's of business success.

Almost anyone can fathom that given a huge population of totally ordinary people, billions of them, a handful will become outrageously wealthy. Almost nobody can fathom they may just be an ordinary person after becoming outrageously wealthy.

What I think humans aren't really equipped to psychologically accept, is that they can simultaneously be struck by success so many times and still be a typical human. Their must be forces at work meaning these preposterously unlikely string of success cannot be coincidental.

But, we know effectively zero probability events (or sequences of events) of people being succesful must be happening all the time. Absolutely they may be the Virginian Park Rangers of success in that they work in the right place and the right time with the right behavioural quirks to be struck by success at a much higher rate.

But in hindsight getting struck by zero-ish probability events almost always feels, to the person being stuck, entirely caused by comprehensible, intrinsic forces rather than attributable to external factors and the nature of probability.

Musk thinking his instincts should be entrusted tight control of man-hours equivalent to all the lifetimes of a small country's population seems almost humble in that case. Why should the experienced insider have a say? How many times have they been struck by success? Surely not as many.

It's just the equivalent of Roy Sullivan carrying his can of water.