This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-no-geniuses-like-Elon-Musk-Steve-Jobs-or-Bill-Gates-in-Europe/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

Well, that’s easy… none of them are (or were) “geniuses.”

All have been sharks in a tank filled with small fish they overpowered and incorporated their value into their own.

In Europe, people are — or were still somewhat considered “people” whose lives held something approximating value — at least enough to not worship greed above their welfare.

The U.S. is unique in that it places profit above human life.

The U.S. is this century’s Rome, while the capitalist system is the equivalent of a gladiatorial pen where the biggest and strongest gladiators suited up with armour mow down victims by the thousands and the crowds cheer all the destruction.

Hell, the crowds get pissed when one of the little people manages to strike back and give the mighty gladiators a humiliating bloody nose. That riles them up and incentivizes them to hate the little people even more while they add more armour and weaponry to the gladiator’s outfits so that they can do more damage.

All three, with some slight exception of Gates, were just smart enough to spot people smart enough to make them rich, and they added them to their gladiator arena to dominate the competition. At the same time, they did everything they could through legal manipulations to weaken their competition.

Ask yourself how it is that an alleged “genius” would forego cancer treatment in favour of new age woo to address a medical condition and die from it. That’s not very “genius-like.”

Meanwhile, Musk proves every day how much of an egotistical buffoon he is while spending $44 billion on the world’s most enormous megaphone to devalue it to such a degree that it’s now worth less than a quarter of its purchase price. Meanwhile, the competition is heating up over which alternative will replace his Xitter.

Of the three, at least Gates puts some effort into helping the most disenfranchised in the world, even if he’s mainly motivated by the potential of new technologies that can become ubiquitous. (His toilet redesign initiative, for example, can potentially transform the world if he succeeds. That’s a level of billions in profit to rival what he got through Microsoft, and it’s also an initiative he’s relying on the genius of others to make manifest. He’s just financing their efforts.)

Even Jobs understood how his “genius” was not “being a genius” but was not getting in the way of real geniuses he hired to profit from.

Musk, on the other hand, is an absolute idiot by contrast because his ego has blinded him to his shortcomings, and he believes, because of his wealth, that he truly is a genius. At the same time, gullible people lap that nonsense up like ice cream.