Misquoted

 

So I've seen this on LinkedIn a few times, and I started wondering: "Did Elon Musk really say this?" So I did a bit of digging. I wasn't able to find a definitive attribution (and certainly nothing linking it to Mr. Musk), but I did find a tweet from a few years back that a number of people seemed to believe was the origin of the text in the picture, sent out by someone who came across as just a regular person. Not a celebrity or a business mogul, but just one of the many everyday people who inhabit Twitter.

Helping friends with their startup businesses is a really good idea; and the analogy to a baby shower is a solid one. So why slap Elon Musk on it? What does he bring to the idea that it doesn't already have? Would someone who didn't think it was otherwise worthwhile really be swayed by the thought that Mr. Musk was doing it?

I wonder if the idea that success means emulating the successful plays into this, and so attaching a concept to a celebrity gives it a greater chance of adoption. Or maybe the culprit is a perception that great ideas come from great people. In either case, if ideas gain more traction for who people associate them with, than for their content, does that prevent society from seeing the wisdom that's all around in the everyday world, articulated by everyday people?