American Geniuses
From Shakespeare's penetrating insight into man's condition to Edison's prolific inventions to Einstein's magisterial formulas, the brilliance of the human mind has captivated us for centuries.
We typically regard geniuses as supremely bright individuals gifted with an uncommon intellect at birth. Genius, it is believed, cannot be taught or acquired; one either has it or doesn't. But this simplistic model presents an incomplete picture of great American overachievers, especially among technology pioneers. They are indisputably intelligent, but their success stems from a variety of factors beyond their raw intellect.
As evident in several recent biographies and one autobiography of four such tech titans — Tesla's and SpaceX's Elon Musk, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Microsoft's Bill Gates — genius requires many important character traits beyond pure brainpower, among them unrelenting dedication, extreme risk tolerance, outsized self-confidence, and a spirited contrarianism. It also demands a support network in the form of family, friends, schools, and even government. On top of all that, it exacts a price that often threatens to undermine it entirely.
So how exactly do our contemporary geniuses thrive? What makes them tick? By considering their lives and careers, we can come to a clearer understanding of the different aspects and sources of their genius, and how we might encourage the emergence of such innovators in the future.
NURTURING A NATURAL GIFT
The traditional notion of genius entails a kind of superintelligence that emerges in an almost mythical manner. As British writer Helen Lewis contended in her 2025 book The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, "in Greek and Roman times, the word genius meant a visiting spirit — you weren't a genius, but one might speak through you." Socrates, for example, "talked about the daimonion that guided him." Our word "genius" is related to jinn or djinn, the Arabic term that also sprouted into genie and denotes a sprite (in turn, a linguistic cousin of "spirit") or supernatural inspiration animating a real-life human.
As I have explained in these pages and explored in greater depth in my recent book, the traditional Jewish analogues for the daimon or djinn are the dybbuk or the maggid, spirits that, for better or worse, animate their human host. Many celebrated Central and Eastern European Jewish scholars credit the maggid in particular for their brilliant and authoritative expositions of Jewish law.
This natural gift, of course, is unearned, which worried Lewis. She fretted that "the mythology of genius can be discouraging to anyone not anointed as brilliant," because "if talent is inborn rather than nurtured, how can a normal human being compete with a genius?"
Many prominent thinkers, from philosophers to geneticists, have offered guidance on how to nurture and channel this natural gift. "Leave exceptional cases to show themselves," wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 work Emile, or On Education. "Let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings."
The geneticist Francis Galton, too, wholeheartedly embraced the nature-over-nurture conception of innate brilliance in his 19th-century work Hereditary Genius. Having ranked his subjects on a scale from A-G, he wrote of those in the highest G category: "The best care that a master can take of such a boy is to leave him alone, just directing a little here and there, and checking desultory tendencies."
In contrast, 20th-century scholars such as Lewis Terman — who pioneered research into the intelligence quotient (IQ), of which he quantified the genius level as 135 — emphasized the role of one's surroundings in shaping exceptional minds. He argued in a 1941 speech:
The genius who survives as such has successfully run the gauntlet of premature death, the stupidities of formal education, the social and ethical pressures of his immediate environment, and the more general culture influences that have given direction and content to the civilization in which he was born.
Terman went on to assert that "genius in the sense of eminence is not a biological concept, though it does have biological prerequisites in ancestral genes, nutrition, and escape from mortal disease."
Our extraordinary American innovators in fact present a combination of intuiting the world and navigating its vicissitudes. Elon Musk bought his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, in the early 1980s at age 11. The Commodore was packaged with a course in the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC), an early programming language; the tutorial involved 60 hours of lessons. "I did it in three days, barely sleeping," Musk told Walter Isaacson, his biographer. Less than two years later, he created his first video game, "Blastar," using 123 lines of BASIC code and other simple tools.
By the mid-1990s, Musk had "thought about the things that will truly affect humanity," and "came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel." These are of course the fields he is still pursuing today.
Similarly, Stephen Witt's 2025 biography The Thinking Machine described Jensen Huang as "propulsive, mercurial, brilliant, and extraordinarily dedicated." Bolstering the "nurture" side of the genius debate, one of Huang's lifelong colleagues said: "He was not born as a great CEO....He transformed himself into one...by problem-solving the inputs and outputs of what a good CEO should be." On the other hand, Morris Chang, founder of the pioneering chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, claimed that "his intellect is just superior."
Sam Altman likewise exhibited a preternatural gift for computation, mastering BASIC at age eight. As he recalled to his 2025 biographer Keach Hagey, he remembered "thinking that someday the computer was going to learn to think." But he also reflected that "the way to get things done is just to be really f***ing persistent." One of Altman's colleagues at Y Combinator, a startup incubator, recollected that playing the board game Settlers of Catan with him was hopeless: "[P]eople had given up wanting to play with him, because he always wins." Along these lines, the New Yorker's Tad Friend wrote in a 2016 profile that, "like everyone in Silicon Valley, Altman professes to want to save the world; unlike almost everyone there, he has a plan to do it."
Bill Gates, too, displayed an uncommon intellect as a youngster. "Early on," he reflected in his recently published account of his early years, Source Code, "my parents knew that the rhythm of my mind was different from that of other kids." He also recalled aggressively deploying his mind in the service of achievement: "I was the kind of kid who wanted to win every game I played, yet I had no particular aim beyond victory. I was raw intelligence, an information omnivore, but I wasn't thinking about the long-term direction of my life." Later, as a teenager at the elite Lakeside School, he noted that "I prided myself on my processing speed — that I could come up with the right answer, the best answer, on the spot. Impatient real-time thinking. And I could work and work and work, for days on end, rarely stopping." And when he was finally able to get his hands on a computer — in 1968, at age 13 — he, too, began his digital education with BASIC, learning a four-line program that taught a computer how to add two numbers.
Uncommon smarts are necessary to the formation of genius, but they're far from sufficient. All four of these tech founders are indisputably brilliant, but they also weren't always the brightest minds among their associates. The ability to recognize even sharper intellects, and to harness their colleagues' energy and talents, proved critical to their successes, as did plain old hard work.
OVERCOMING FAILURE
Intellect isn't enough to underwrite a genius's success; only a borderline insane commitment to executing ideas will suffice. This is especially true when such commitment is most needed: at a moment of potential failure. This is what Lewis labeled "the mythology of the genius as a human computer." Early computing pioneer William Shockley ranked himself a genius only "insofar as genius may be sweat and effort."
American geniuses never give up, even when the odds against them appear insurmountable. In late 2008, SpaceX was days away from bankruptcy after its first three rocket launches failed. When the fourth succeeded, NASA rewarded the company's extraordinary dedication with a $1.6 billion contract. Musk seeks to inculcate an "extremely hardcore" ethos into his companies.
Since Nvidia's founding, the company's informal slogan has been that it "is 30 days from going out of business." While this has been literally true on only a few occasions, Huang prides himself on always treating it like a real possibility. "[J]ust iterate, iterate, iterate, execute, execute, execute," as one programmer described the company's approach. (Incidentally Huang's biographer, Stephen Witt, distinguished between the Tesla and Nvidia founders on the basis of what he calls "the vision question, with Musk moving backward from fantasy and Huang moving forward from reality.")
Altman, too, rebounded from challenging circumstances early on, when the 2008-09 financial crisis deeply depressed the value of Loopt, his first company. He ultimately sold it for $43.4 million — not much more than he had raised to fund it years earlier. But he plowed his profits into Y Combinator, where he would go on to thrive.
As for Gates, Microsoft nearly foundered before it fully launched. In 1977, Gates quit Harvard to work full time at the company but faced expensive litigation with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the computer manufacturer for whom he had developed source code. In an extreme cash crunch, Microsoft prepared to close its doors. Only a few timely contracts with Tandy/Radio Shack, Apple, and Commodore rescued Gates from insolvency.
CONFIDENCE AND CONTRARIANISM
Other critical elements in a genius's breakthrough are self-confidence and a healthy spirit of contrarianism — essentially the courage to encounter the world as it is but to believe in oneself sufficiently to insist that this same world could be much improved. Exceptional innovators constantly straddle the line between delusion and deliverance, rendering possible the highly improbable despite enormous opposition.
This is what Isaacson labels in Musk "reality-bending willfulness," and quoting Bud Tribble in his biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, "a reality distortion field." For example, Musk refused to accept the reality of something as basic and deeply rooted as the Defense Department's cost-plus contracting system, which privileged well-established incumbents such as Boeing or Lockheed Martin against upstarts like SpaceX. "They have an incentive never to finish," he lamented, whereas his company's outcome-based, fixed-price bids "reward results rather than waste." His successful SpaceX launches persuaded the Pentagon to adjust its decades-long bidding process.
At what was likely his lowest point in 2008, after three failed SpaceX launches and a barrage of bad news, Musk insisted to Wired magazine: "We're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work." Sure enough, later that year, his Falcon 1 lifted off from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands and successfully carried its dummy payload into orbit. Huang and Altman, too, suffered major technological and financial setbacks before achieving astounding successes.
Musk also famously bet on himself in 2018 when he agreed to receive no salary from Tesla in exchange for earning a hefty payday if the company's valuation rose to $650 billion, "a figure many experts would contend is laughably impossible," wrote the New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin. In January 2021, Tesla's stock price soared, and the company reached $1 trillion in market capitalization. Musk took home $56 billion; his $11 billion tax bill was the largest in history. And in September 2025, he doubled down, securing a compensation package worth nearly $1 trillion if the company hits certain benchmarks over the next decade.
Musk's instincts led him to resist conventional wisdom. An executive wielding a Yellow Pages directory once asked him: "You ever think you're going to replace this?" He did indeed with his first startup, Zip2, an online directory that he and his brother sold for more than $300 million four years after starting it. Musk explained his approach to the New York Times in June 2018, after building a makeshift manufacturing tent outside Tesla's Fremont, California, facility: "If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is necessary."
Nvidia's Huang, too, faced massive skepticism. "The success rate of parallel computing was zero percent before we came along," he told his biographer. "Literally zero. Everyone who tried to make it into a business had failed." Sun Microsystems rejected his partners' proposal to optimize a cheaper version of their chip for video games. As Stephen Witt put it, a "haughty executive informed them that Sun supplied scientists, not gamers." A few years later, Sun declined while Nvidia rose. Witt limned Huang as "a stubborn entrepreneur who pushed his radical vision for computing for thirty years, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive."
Later, when Nvidia was pivoting to AI, it narrowly fended off an activist investor's challenge to its new strategy. Fidelity "beat the crap out of us," a board member loyal to Huang said. "It wasn't clear that there was a path to a real breakthrough." But there was — as deployment of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) exploded, Nvidia's stock soared. (It's up more than 600-fold since 2013.) According to Witt, both Musk and Huang "moved with confidence into barren commercial brownfields, strewn with the remains of luckless entrepreneurs, and for the first time made them bloom."
As for Sam Altman, his biographer, Keach Hagey, described him as someone who can "take the nearly impossible, convince others that it was in fact possible, and then raise so much money that it actually becomes possible." One Y Combinator colleague called him "the only person I've ever met in my life who only wants to work on things that could change the world, even if there's only a one percent chance of them working."
Altman roundly rejected others' skepticism. When entering a software competition shortly after beginning college, the organizer wrote to him: "You know, Sam, you're only a freshman. You have plenty of time to start a startup. Why don't you just apply later?" Altman replied curtly: "I'm a sophomore, and I'm coming to the interview." Later, a mobile-carrier executive fielding one of his pitches observed that Altman "probably weighed a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, and he's surrounded by all these middle-aged adults that are just taking in his gospel....Anyone who came across him at the time wished they had some of what he had."
Even among the genius founders, there's a hierarchy of contrarianism. Altman recalled that, when he and Musk began discussing OpenAI, the SpaceX chief waxed rhapsodic about extraplanetary life. "The thing that sticks in memory," he said, "was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking, 'huh, so that's the benchmark for what conviction looks like.'" This is the sound of one supremely confident contrarian genuflecting to another.
Like the others, Gates rebelled from conventional wisdom, beginning at a young age. He recalled thinking: "Why should I have to do things that didn't matter to me? Never mind that my mom and dad provided everything I had or ever needed, from the material to the emotional; I just didn't get why they were in charge. Their power seemed arbitrary."
His challenge to authority can be traced as far back as 1968, when he discerned that computer manufacturers such as IBM and DEC "made their money on hardware" and treated "software [as] an afterthought, so low in value it was thrown in for free." A decade later, shortly before forming the company they originally called Micro-Soft, Gates and co-founder Paul Allen recognized the comparative advantage that coding afforded them. "Writing software was just brainpower and time," Gates recalled. "And it's what we knew how to do, what made us unique. It was where we had an advantage. We could even lead the way."
For Gates, the breakthrough moment arrived in 1975 when MITS introduced the first mass-produced "microcomputer," the Altair 8800; it retailed for $400, boasted Intel's revolutionary 8080 processor, and offered up to 64 KB in memory. His team developed a BASIC interpreter that allowed users to program the computer directly, predicting that, "as personal computers got cheaper and cheaper, and spread into businesses and homes, there would be a nearly unlimited corresponding demand for high-quality software." Microsoft's astonishing success proved his conviction right.
"EXTREME TOLERANCE FOR RISK"
Those willing to rebel against the crowd must also be able to tolerate an extraordinary amount of risk. Great minds like Musk, Lewis argued, are "perfectly suited for success in a particular place and time — the American tech scene in the early twenty-first century." The inhabitants of that scene, in her pithy summary, display traits such as "an extreme tolerance for risk" and "a willingness to break the rules."
Isaacson also emphasized Musk's "sense of mission" and "cosmic view" of his work. "His heritage and breeding," the biographer wrote, "along with the hardwiring of his brain, made him at times callous and impulsive. It also led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk." Peter Thiel, Musk's PayPal co-founder, has said that "Elon wants risk for its own sake. He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it." Channeling Edison, Musk himself said that, to consider oneself a co-founder of a successful company, "[t]here's got to be some combination of inspiration, perspiration, and risk."
To his credit, Musk has recognized how unusual his character traits are. "To anyone I've offended," Musk confessed during a 2021 appearance on Saturday Night Live, "I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?"
According to Isaacson, Musk's philosophy of space travel, especially to Mars, derives from three motivators. First, he fretted that "technological progress was not inevitable" and "could even backslide." Second, he believed that "colonizing other planets would help ensure the survival of human civilization." And third, in Musk's words, "the United States is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration," a spirit in desperate need of reignition.
Huang embodies a similar spirit of risk-taking; Witt wrote that the tech founder "reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow." This comfort with danger is a peculiarly American trait and is even more pronounced among Americans by choice, such as the South Africa-born Musk and the Taiwan-born Huang. In Witt's description, both Musk and Huang are "immigrants," "workaholics," and "visionaries." "They were screamers; they were gamblers; they were world-class engineers."
In the words of Hagey, Altman is "a brilliant dealmaker with a need for speed and a love of risk, who believes in technological progress with an almost religious conviction." Altman famously declined to accept equity in OpenAI, a decision Hagey described as "virtually without precedent in the history of American business." Altman also favors a form of universal basic income, or "universal basic wealth," as he calls it. In a March 2021 essay, he hatched a scheme for awarding every American citizen a certain amount of equity in the land and companies of the United States.
The now ubiquitous ChatGPT emerged almost by accident. "Somehow this chat interface is a way bigger deal than people realized," Altman recalled. Within two months, the app had reached 100 million users — the fastest-growing consumer tech product ever.
Gates, too, while more cautious than his contemporaries, gambled heavily with his own future. He bet on himself by leaving Harvard midway through his junior year to concentrate full time on building Microsoft. The rest is history.
SUPPORT SYSTEMS
Geniuses do not emerge ex nihilo from the primordial ooze; a network of familial, educational, technological, and even governmental support undergirds their efforts. Put differently, many of the world's greatest breakthroughs arrived only after innovators manipulated their environment in a dedicated and clever way.
Most super-achievers relied on extensive support systems, beginning in the household. "A genius must be fed, washed and dressed, must have his works copied out innumerable times," wrote Leo Tolstoy's wife of her husband, for whom she performed all of the above. Lewis noted that Fyodor Dostoevsky and T. S. Eliot married their stenographers, and Gertrude Stein relied so heavily on her partner, Alice Toklas, that she even wrote Toklas's "autobiography." "The wife holds a unique position in the mythology of genius," Lewis wryly observed.
The four geniuses we're examining here experienced very different upbringings, but each was tinged with a mix of support and challenge. Musk's story involves considerable complexity: a father who allegedly manipulated and mistreated him, along with his siblings and his mother, but is also said to have invested $28,000 in his first company (which Musk denies). Musk's complicated romantic relationships, involving several children by multiple mothers, have both prodded and impeded his business successes.
Huang was born to doting, demanding parents who believed in their son and expected much from him. Reflecting on his hardscrabble childhood at a boarding school in rural Kentucky, Huang said, "back then, there wasn't a counselor to talk to. Back then, you just had to toughen up and move on."
For his part, Altman grew up in a loving, middle-class home, but he encountered challenges when coming out of the closet as a teenager. "Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing," he recalled.
Gates, too, grew up in an idyllic middle-class home. He reckons he combines his dad's "deliberate and unapologetically pragmatic" disposition with his mother's traits of being "gregarious, and also not shy about getting what she wanted." All four thus managed to draw both encouragement and motivation from their upbringings.
Beyond the domestic front, geniuses often thrive in an environment that is congenial to their development and that encourages experimentation. "Masterpieces," Virginia Woolf wrote in "A Room of One's Own," "are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common." And indeed, Galileo, a lens grinder, confirmed the heliocentric universe after he had developed a lens providing 20-times magnification. Edison accumulated 1,000 patented inventions, which amounts to an unbelievable rate of one issued patent every 11 days most of his adult life, almost all of which were improvements on existing technology. "My so-called inventions," Edison confided at one point, "already existed in the environment — I took them out. I've created nothing. Nobody does. There's no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside."
Similarly, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, humbly credited existing ideas that he "merely" synthesized in an effective way. "Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already," Berners-Lee said in 2007. "I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalizing, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system."
Schools, businesses, dependable legal regimes, and governmental authorities also provide resources critical to innovation — though with the latter, the causality is murkier. For example, many credit California's prohibition on non-compete clauses in employment contracts, along with the influence of top-flight technical research universities such as Berkeley and Stanford, with spurring the efflorescence of ideas in Silicon Valley. In addition, Lewis noted that Musk's companies benefited from direct government support: "SpaceX was rescued from the brink of going broke," she wrote, "by a $1.6 billion NASA contract to resupply the International Space Station in December 2008." Of course, this contract arrived months after Musk had finally proven he could execute a successful launch. At the same time, Tesla accepted nearly half a billion dollars in Department of Energy loans in 2010, which it repaid in full.
Similarly, Gates took full advantage of the infrastructure presented to him, beginning with the earliest teletype machines at Lakeside and continuing at Harvard, where the Department of Defense had installed a bespoke version of the DEC PDP-10 machine, nicknamed the Harv-10. Gates and associates spent dozens of hours per week in Harvard's Aiken Computation Laboratory, toiling away for free on the Harv-10 and eventually incubating the code that would power Microsoft. In fact, Gates faced expulsion at the hands of Harvard's administrative board for his unauthorized use of university resources, but he managed to escape with a slap on the wrist when some of his professors leapt to his defense. (One instructor called the proceedings a "travesty of justice.")
Government involvement, however, can be a double-edged sword. Microsoft and OpenAI have both candidly lobbied the federal government to impose top-down regulation of AI, which would prevent upstart challengers from entering the market. Nvidia successfully pressed the Trump administration to reverse a ban on exports to China of its market-leading H20 chip, despite concerns that selling advanced chips to an adversary could harm U.S. security. When geniuses and their companies collude with state authorities, nothing good can be expected to result.
THE PRICE OF GENIUS
Not only do geniuses threaten U.S. economic competition and security; they also exact a steep cost on themselves and those around them. Throughout her book, Lewis looked skeptically on the notion of genius, focusing her concern on how brilliance often licenses eccentricity, if not outright vice. "A suite of behaviors that would otherwise be inexcusable," she wrote, "are forgiven when they are the price of greatness."
Lewis called this the "deficit model of genius," which "suggests that exceptional talent extorts a price." Francis Galton described this model more ominously:
Men who leave their mark on the world are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity.
Look no further than John Nash, the "beautiful mind" who descended into madness; or William Shockley, the mid-century Nobel Prize-winning engineer who spiraled into racism and eugenics and contributed to a "Nobel sperm bank"; or Doron Blake, a 180-IQ product of that sperm bank, who confessed to an interviewer that "the fact that I have a huge IQ does not make me a person who is good or happy."
Each of the four geniuses chronicled here suffered from such deficits to one degree or another. "As Shakespeare teaches us," Isaacson wrote, "all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered....Even the best people...are 'molded out of faults.'" More colloquially, he argued, "sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training."
The tragic flaws of Musk, Isaacson's subject, have been splashed across the pages of newspapers for years and need not be rehashed here in great detail. Suffice it to say that Musk's darker characteristics have often threatened to overwhelm his considerable accomplishments. Even so, a Tesla executive who left due to frustration with Musk once mused: "Maybe if the price the world pays for this kind of accomplishment is a real asshole doing it, well, it's probably a price worth paying."
Huang, too, has his explosive side. "I will never forget the first time I saw him erupt," one Nvidia employee told Witt. "I'd been working there for a couple of months, and Jensen was always so charming and self-deprecating. Suddenly, he's screaming at the top of his voice in front of a hundred people." The biographer reckoned that Huang's "criticisms weren't always constructive — sometimes they were just verbal abuse."
Some of his former colleagues defend him, however; one insisted that "Jensen is a good person at heart who had to be ruthless." Another executive said: "He would never just yell at some guy in the hall. When he's torturing people, he's forcing them to learn a lesson — and they certainly would never forget it." As Witt discovered, Huang can also become short tempered about his technology and the risks it entails. "I'm so tired of this question," Huang told Witt when he had the audacity to ask about AI's potential for catastrophe. "All this theorizing about something that there's no evidence for."
Hagey argued in her biography that Altman "sometimes moves too fast for the people around him," and that his "aversion to confrontation has occasionally allowed bigger conflicts to arise." She quoted a Y Combinator partner who said he's "conflict avoidant, not a great communicator, and sometimes he moves so quickly that he breaks trust." This character trait has had real-world consequences, including the defection of his longtime OpenAI collaborator Dario Amodei, who now runs Anthropic. Amodei left the company because of what he called "psychological abuse" by Altman; he also believed that the latter improperly bulldozed the safeguards around ChatGPT. At the same time, Amodei called him "a good person who means well. He is moral. He tries to do the right thing." In addition, Hagey described Altman as "warm, charming, thoughtful, kind." He resisted his biographer's efforts to record an accomplished life, calling them "a decade or two premature."
Gates, though perhaps a milder case, admitted he was obnoxious as a child and teenager; he believes he should have been placed on the autism spectrum. At times, he exhibited awareness of this trait, recalling in his memoir that he "read books on Napoleon, marveling at his genius and his terrible flaws." But at other times, his resistance to societal norms occasionally came across to others as cluelessness, if not outright meanness. Isaacson reckoned that both Gates and Musk "have analytic minds, an ability to laser-focus, and an intellectual surety that edges into arrogance." Musk once erupted in anger when he found out that Gates had shorted Tesla stock. "How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change," Musk wondered, "and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?" From Gates's perspective, though, it was just business.
The deficit model both causes and stems from a certain kind of hubris, which manifests as the unfortunate tendency of these geniuses to engage in side projects poorly suited to their skills and temperaments. Whether in Musk's ill-fated DOGE experiment or Altman's dalliances with the rationalist and effective-altruist movements, great innovators often don't appreciate when to stay in their respective lanes.
It might be impossible to disentangle the darker aspects of genius from its positive facets. But there also may be ways to dilute them.
CULTIVATING GENIUS
Lewis concluded in her book that we "need the idea of the genius — the demigod, the superhero, the shaman." The notion of the brilliant innovator is an enduring feature of the American story, and our economy and polity rely on technological breakthroughs to sustain our way of life. "We should not be opposed to celebrated talent, or ambition, or achievement," Lewis continued. "But we should be humble about where those qualities can be found, and whether they are always properly recognized. There are many seeds of genius in the world. We must nurture as many as we can."
How might we cultivate the next American geniuses? What can we as a society do to foster and, when necessary, rein in the excesses of super-achievers?
First, we should appreciate that genius requires a unique combination of brilliance, dedication, risk tolerance, and contrarianism, none of which can exist to the exclusion of the others. We should encourage scholastic achievement while not spurning students who display oppositional characteristics. Instead, parents, teachers, and friends should channel those unique energies into constructive pursuits.
Second, we should recognize that family, school, law, and at times government can play important roles in spurring geniuses to greatness. We should continue to invest in the kinds of academic and technological infrastructure likely to provide a platform on which innovators can build. And we should ensure that lawmakers and regulators alike provide appropriate incentives for continued development.
Finally, it's important to realize that we'll never be able to stamp out entirely the darker side of genius, which is often an inseparable part of its essence. But we can formulate ways to harness these energies and redirect them in positive directions. Those close to the greatest American innovators — be they spouses, children, lifelong friends, or mentors — should strive to make sure these geniuses are applying their talents in the most effective and suitable way possible to the most pressing and appropriate challenges, while not neglecting the ethical implications of their actions.
We'll never be able to tame genius, nor should we want to. But in Musk, Huang, Altman, and Gates, we find models of what creates and drives legendary innovators of the past and present. May we see many more such geniuses arise in the future.
