There’s some crazy weirdness surrounding Elon Musk. He’s the darling child of what seems like all the internet, but most of his followers are paid for. Unfortunately for someone held in such high regard by tech bros everywhere as some kind of god, his phone records have revealed his ideas actually kind of suck, and he’s surround by sycophantic suck ups.

I won’t go into the ins and outs of what is contained in his texts and emails, there are more intelligent people than I to do that. What I will say is that reading some of these summarisations has made me feel much better about my business life. No longer am I held back by the ideas that some of them might suck. As Charlie Warzel pointed out, “Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone”.

There truly are some absolute stinkers that come from both Elon and his long list of suck ups. Two of my favourites are Elon suggesting that people pay to tweet (at a cost of 0.1 Dodge Coin) and Jason Calacanis having “the best idea ever for monetization,”. His world-changing brain fart was charging famous people to be able to spam their followers with DMs. This is without the several conversations that exist in which they try to “solve free speech”.

Never again am I going to chastise myself for having poor ideas, or even a lack of good ones. Clearly not the only reason, but a large part of people like Musk’s success comes down to finance backing and the availability of opportunity. Which is about as far away from what we are led to believe. We are told that the reason he is so successful is his ridiculously long days, or his tenacious attitude to working. Not the billions in the bank, and being surrounded by people that can provide opportunities to thrive.

Both of these things are true of Musk, and he does a much better job of application than I ever could. However, peaking into his phone records gives me a behind the curtain glimpse. Allowing me to understand the real workings of those in successful positions. My ideas might sometimes suck, but they don’t suck as bad as this, and if they did, I would keep it to myself!