I used to know someone wealthy whose continued wealth relied on working with local and state governments. This person's public correspondence in lawsuits and with local government officials was purposefully littered with spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization errors. When I asked them about it, their response was that it was on purpose so that they seemed less smart and thus less threatening, with the hope that they would get more favorable rulings and contracts by not seeming like "one of the big entities."

I'm not asking you to believe me on this, but sharing it more as an anecdote of: something on the surface is sometimes not the reality of what's underneath.

> But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.

I kinda assumed that was (at least partly) a "flex," basically doing something dumb to show you're such hot stuff you can get away with it. It's like Sam Altman writing in lowercase all the time.

I've found that problem solving intelligence and language skills are not that strongly correlated. He clearly had some kind of skill to keep his operation running, even before you consider the more cynical explanations in the other replies.

He was probably more impressive in-person.

An email is an email. I used to talk to contacts like that all the time and they did too. These are quick interchanges with folk.

The grammar police as well as PC became a thing and now everyone is expected to construct paragraphs of text without any grammatical errors otherwise you're mobbed and lynched.

Just because you're expecting full pronunciation doesn't mean others do. I'd rather write with laziness and short hand than having to punctuate a whole paragraph and bore the person to death like this paragraph.

I like using “astute businessman” as a backhanded compliment sometimes.

Usually meaning the revenues and results are there .. although everything about their personal or professional ethos disgusts me.

Eh. From time to time you’ll have that one brilliant but grossly tangential asset on a team who leaves you wondering if they’re manic or cracked out from the weekend.

Who’s in infrastructure and hasn’t sent a few sleep-deprived and cringey status updates out at 6am :D

Okay okay okay fine, it’s an internet comment section I don’t have to be PC. I think this one’s coke.

somehow he was allowed to teach college classes without a degree, doors just open like that when you’re part of the tribe of pedophiles

I think that ... given one specific topic, few people understand it while the vast majority is completely oblivious to its workings.

So they then hear someone who speaks like that, with a fast cadence and Andrew Tate's "Confidence" TM, and are inclined to think "yeah, the guy looks like he knows what he's talking about".

But for people who have minimal knowledge about the thing, it's evident that said person is just stupid.