“What’s The Biggest Example Of ‘Genius’ To ‘Idiot’ There Has Ever Been?” (22 Answers)

Elon musk comes to mind immediately. Well, he was probably an idiot the whole time but he had the veneer of a genius for a while

Rudy Giuliani. Not really genius, but highly respected - in terms of going from being nearly universally well-regarded to an absolute joke, he’s definitely up there

Ben Carson, world acclaimed neurosurgeon and believer that the pyramids of Egypt were built to store grain.

At my university we had a Harvard educated ER physician ruin his career and go to prison because he was hiding cameras in employee bathrooms

I think that qualifies lol

I think Steve Jobs was a marketing and sales genius. Then when it came to his treatable cancer ... well I wouldn't call him an idiot, but he placed his faith in the wrong person and his "I always win" attitude cost him his life.

He was unlucky to get cancer, but lucky that it was treatable at the stage it was discovered ... but he ignored his doctors and thought that changing his diet would heal him.

John Harvey Kellog. Nutritionist, inventor of corn flakes.

Then decided that being a eugenicist was better. Oh, and decided that women’s clitorises should be burned off with acid or removed altogether.

As a Pole I have to mention an absolute winner from our side:

Lech Walesa - he posts the stupidest s**t you could imagine on social media, always speaks about himself as a sole savior of the entire human race, everything, EVERYTHING is happening thanks to him. He is posting this on a Polish equivalent of Reddit, so people are just teasing him there to post even more of such stupidities and he always falls for that.

On top of that he posts there his naked photos in a bathtub full of beer, posts poorly photoshopped posters of himself with other historical figures… basically the guy made a walking meme out of himself…

And he is still giving lectures on European Universities as a special guest somehow…

Edit: I didn’t realize this needs to be added, but he is a Peace Noble Prize winner, the face and one of the leaders of the solidarity movement and a former president of Poland…

Don’t understand how Sam Bankman-Fried isn’t on this list yet. Dude was in magazines being called a prophet and genius, turns out he was just a f*****g idiot the whole time

The guy that invented PCR (which was ground breaking in early DNA research, got a nobel prize, though most probably remember it from the Covid days) went off the rails, denied that HIV caused AIDS even after it was scientific consensus and spent his time talking to a glowing racoon in the forest at night.

Linus Pauling. He went from being a preeminent chemist and biochemist to a quack who wrote books claiming that megadoses of vitamin C cured all disease and was the key to an insanely long life.

Al capone legendary gangster, died of syphilis with the brain age of a child. Sometimes karma does happen

Russell Brand in 2015 was voted Prospect's fourth most influential thinker **in the world**, now he's accused of multiple assaults and is a rabid conspiracist.

Steven Seagal. He bullsh**ted his way to the top , fake it till you make it genius. Got into a fight and s**t himself literally idiot.

John McAfee.
Not sure of the genuis part, but the downfall was legendary. He wrote and marketed the first commercial antivirus software after cutting teeth at NASA, Univac, and Xerox as a coder. Might have peaked around 100 million dollars.
Then he sold his stake, told everyone to uninstall his companies product, retired, got into recreational [substances], lost tens of millions, possibly [ended] a man in Belize, probably f****d a literal whale, ran for president of the US, and then was arrested in Spain for US tax evasion and then either [took his own life or someone else took it].

Gerald Ratner - made two ill-thought statements during a speech in 1991 in which he called his own products c**p and lost half a billion gbp (1991 gbp at that!) off the value of his company overnight!

“costs less than a prawn sandwich from marks and spencer, and probably lasts just as long”

&

“people say, how can you sell it for such a low price, I say, because it’s total c**p!”

He said this to a room with a high number of journalists which took the story and ran with it. After this, anyone buying anything for a gift for a loved one from one of Ratner’s stores branded themselves as cheap, so sales plummeted. He was ousted as chairman within a year and they had to change their name!

Shooting your own company in the foot like this has since became known as “the Ratner effect” or “doing a Ratner”

William Shockley led the team at Bell Labs that invented the transistor. That breakthrough yielded portable radios and hearing aids, and made computer microchips possible in the decades that followed. He essentially allowed computers to go from filling a room in a building to eventually fitting in a desktop and then in your pocket. He received a Nobel prize along with his team, and then spent the rest of his life spewing racism and eugenics garbage.

Thomas Midgley. All his inventions were thought to be great contributions to mankind until we found out they were dumping crazy amount of toxins into the atmosphere and burning a hole in the ozone layer.

Napoleon. Steamrolls europe, 6+ Times and suddenly forget logistics and Diplomacy where and when it matters the most.

He's not the biggest example, but Jordan Peterson seems to fit the description of genius to idiot. It actually makes me sad, because years ago it seemed he just legitimately wanted to help people. I first heard him telling people to value taking many small steps towards progress instead of trying to rapidly do everything at once, and for some I'm sure that makes sense.

Then he got popular and being in the public eye means taking criticism he clearly was incapable of dealing with in a healthy manner. He became bitter and cynical, fell apart mentally, developed an addiction, went to Russia, and came back using a lot of specialized jargon to legitimize junk ideas. He's now the idiot's version of a smart man, talking a lot while saying little.

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for but this one came to the top of my head:

A guy I worked with 23M went to the casino to play some black Jack. He came into work the next day with 4 giant bags of Burger King.

“Hey everyone, lunch is on me!!”

He ended up wining $1400 going in with only $200 (we were a bunch of young bucks so $1400 was a substantial amount of cash in our eyes). Everyone was talking to him about it and asking him how he did it. Let me tell you, he was very very VERY proud of his accomplishment. He then proceeded to explain how it’s done:

“You just have to know how to read the cards”

“Black Jack is all about skill, you need to know when you bet and when you don’t. Some people have it and some people simply don’t”

“It’s takes years of playing the game”

My man was on a high horse and honestly we were all very impressed. He was talking like he knew his s**t and he was soaking it all in. All the guys on the showroom floor were standing around him listening to him boast about the winnings, him even showing everyone the cash. We asked him if he is going to go back:

“Of course, it’s free money”

Well, he goes back that night for a second time. He stays at the casino for hours and goes in with all his earnings from the night before…

Starts gambling:

Losses all of his earnings from last night in about an hours worth of time.

Then proceeds to pull out more cash from his bank account (his entire paycheck he got 2 days ago) and looses all of that as well.

If you get lucky, don’t get cocky.