“What’s The Biggest Example Of ‘Genius’ To ‘Idiot’ There Has Ever Been?” (22 Answers)
Life is a continuous learning experience, and it just so happens that sometimes we make mistakes and go down wrong paths!
So, to perhaps make you feel better about your so-called hiccups, Bored Panda has garnered a list of 22 accomplished "geniuses" who lost the plot and succumbed to, well, "idiocy" and never bounced back. Now, grab a snack or a nice little bev, pull your chair in closer, and enjoy the ride.
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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
Let's get him to the 1st place. Without his family's apartheid emerald mine money, he'd be just another incel chud complaining about "forced diversity" on the internet.
but he is just another incel chud complaining about "forced diversity" on the internet.
Load More Replies...He just accused the First Minister of Scotland (Humza Yousaf) of being racist because Humza pointed out that he’s quite often the only non white person in the room in 99% of his meetings. Elon is a prime twatface.
I saw that too. As Frankie Boyle once said, Musk has "a personality bad, even by South African standards"...
Load More Replies...He paid $44 Billion to buy a company worth $25 Billion and with hard work and diligence, turned it into an $8 Billion company.
He's the first one that popped into my head when I saw the topic title. I think he first showed he was insane when those kids got trapped in the cave and instead of waiting to use his invention that would save them, a different guy was able to get him out. Musk ended up slandering tf out of him, calling him a pedo and it actually resulted in a lawsuit. Musk had better lawyers and got off. The wealthy do not face justice.
That was the turning point for me. I fell for all the " isnt he great articles" but reading that ?
Load More Replies...Thing is, you can be a genius in some areas - and Musk are a genius in some areas - while being a total twatt in every other aspect of life. Just like Musk. Because he is a... why bother, Bored Panda will sensor any good name for what that dude are.
In what area is he a genius? Being born rich? He has not designed or invented almost anything for which he is credited. But he seems to cause businesses more harm than good. Suspect he is very much like Trump, if you could simply invested his money and a high yield savings account he would (all of us would) be better off.
Load More Replies...Yeah, he was really never a genius but was very good at taking credit for other people's innovation. "Founder of Tesla"? Not so much, he contractually obligated the actual tesla owners to make him a "founder" retroactively. I mean, the guy is smart, don't get me wrong, but then so am I and a lot of other people that don't act like douchebags online for kicks.
He apparently takes a lot of drugs. Hard drugs. Google it. IMHO he is crazy.
The game "Good Pizza, Great Pizza" features him as a "special visitor" alongside such people as Mozart and Dracula.
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
No, he was always a sham. His reputation as a New York mafia-busting state prosecutor was based on the independent work of the feds. His career as mayor was just a rightward swing of the pendulum that had reached its annoying limit by 9/11.
True, but he was well-regarded by people who didn't know any better. He could've just retired or gone into the private sector after 2001 and most of us would have never known what a wanker he really is.
Load More Replies...Rudy said it was safe to start the cleanup of the 9-11 site immediately. Over 500 people got cancer after working there.
Ben Carson, world acclaimed neurosurgeon and believer that the pyramids of Egypt were built to store grain.
He believes in the literal truth of the Genesis creation story as well as a bunch of fringe right-wing fundamentalist nonsense.
You see, the pharaohs really loved their grain so they wanted to be buried in it ...
Well, Daniel Jackson was kicked out of Academia when he said the pyramids were built by aliens, and guess who was right? :)
Just because you are an expert at one particularly difficult thing, does not mean you are in any way an authority on any other matter.
Honestly, that´s at least better then believing aliens were somehow involved in building the pyramids.
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've always wondered why do people do this when there are literally exabytes of porn freely accessible on the 'net.
I would imagine because they get off on seeing the specific people around them like their coworkers. Perhaps their subtle suggestions of only fans go unheeded? All jokes aside, trying to understand creepers being creepy…
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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.
HIs treatment of his daughter for a good portion of her life is deplorable. He was a horrible human being.
Load More Replies...He was an idiot. I know people have autonomy over their own health and treatment decisions, but the type of tumour he had was eminently survivable. He had an islet cell neuroendocrine tumour (NET). These are NOT the horribly malignant pancreatic cancers that rapidly kill-islet cell NETs have a 95% 5 year survival following standard medical and surgical treatment. 95% of patients survive 5 years after diagnosis if they choose conventional therapeutic options. Instead, he decided to disregard conventional medicine and died as a result.
By all accounts he was an complete arsehole from the beginning. Pretty sure he tried to screw over Wozniak as well.
Several times, including telling him they'd been paid a lot less for some jobs than they'd actually been paid, and pocketing the difference himself.
Load More Replies...Well, the 5yr survival rate for pancreatic cancer if caught early before spreading from pancreas is only 27%, drops to 7% if escaped. I don't think odds were on his side.
Not for the type of tumour he had. 95% survival at 5 years.
Load More Replies...It's because of this guy that none of my electronics have more than one or two buttons. Functional, tactile, efficient buttons. For some reason this one screwjob didn't like buttons, and now the whole world has to do without them. Screw Jobs.
Jobs survived eight years before succumbing to the disease in 2011. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is only nine percent. Since PNETs are so uncommon, their treatment options are not yet well-defined. Currently, there is no standard of care or standard treatment for these types of tumors.
The type he had had a 95% survival rate at 5 years with treatment.
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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.
He invented the cornflakes because he believed it would douse the sexual urges.
Cornflakes was created by accident when a batch of cereal dough was left out over night. Instead of throwing it out, it was rolled and ended up as a flake. He did invent the malted nut cereal, which the recipe was stolen by C.W. Post. Post also stole the cornflakes recipe, too.
Load More Replies...I knew the guy was weirdly hung up on the concept of human lust, but the clitoris thing? Yikes!!
Him and his brother split ways because he refused to add sugar to make his cereal more palatable. He truly felt that blandness would curb lust
He is also a key reason circumcision is prevalent in the US. He held enough sway to advocate circumcision as a deterrent to masturbation. Dude was fücking mental.
Because lust, especially of the female variety, makes the Baby Jesus™ cry or something. 🙄
Load More Replies...I had to do a biographical paper on Kellog for a class I took when I was teaching in the Seventh Day Adventist system and working toward a credential. (Kellog was very big in the Adventist church in his time, and was a close friend of the church's founder, although he was eventually disfellowshipped. ) One source I found recently described him as having a quest for wellness along with a prejudice againts people who did not meet his criteria for excellence. That's him in a nutshell. He had a big hand in changing medical practices toward the more modern, safer medicine we have today. However, some of the "therapies" he did in his sanitarium/spa were extreme and eventually discredited. The "perfectionism" also resulted in his eugenict views and his insistence on sexual purity (celibacy). This extended to his own marriage of decades: they never consummated the relationship. Adopted eight children, though. Definitely a fringe guy in many ways.
Check out "The Road to Wellville". A lot of interesting actors. Anthony Hopkins plays Kellog.
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…
UKer here, I didn't realise how much the Poles hated Lech until I had a chat with a Polish guy in a pub. From what he said Lech is despised at home, I told him that my experience is seeing him on the news as a child almost weekly, to us in the UK he was the face of Solidarnosc, he was shocked. If what he said is true then it's likely he's a bit of a pariah and gone a little mad.
Sounds like he has an ego problem and maybe a fantasy that he's a sex symbol. Another Pavel Faun ( look him up)
From the dystopian Thatcherite Britain of the 1980s he appeared as a beacon of hope for someone at least. Reading this has been quite upsetting tbh. That such a revolutionary who marked such an heroic place in modern history is now so ridiculed - and perhaps through neurological degeneration he is unaware of, like Thatcher, but they kept her out of the public eye for posterity's sake.
As a kid growing up in England in the 80's he was a big and admirable figure. Just goes to show my country doesnt have all the nutjobs haha
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.
They sometimes glow under UV light. Did he have a UV light with him or is he a complete wackadoo?
Load More Replies...He was a climate change denier as well-he believed that climate change was happening, but it wasn't caused by or accelerated by human activity, despite that being a general consensus in the scientific community.
He also believed he was visited by glowing alien racoons. See, this a fun fact about how our brains work - You've got on part that searches for patterns and another that filters those pattern ID's as either false or true. If your pattern recognition is super high, you can ID stuff like PCR, but if your filter isn't very high, you can do that and also believe in alien racoons.
Aw, what did Detective Wojciehowicz from Barney Miller ever do that was bad?
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.
There's a condition that's been called "Nobel Disease" that affects some Nobel prize winners, Linus Pauling and Kary Mullis are two of those usually cited as examples. They either start believing they are experts on everything and anything, or they start pontificating about pseudo-science like ESP, paranormal activity, ancient astronauts and alien visitation.
The generic statement that megadoses of vitamin c cure everything is false. But the use of high doses of vitamin c as a treatment is actively being reseached for specific uses, such as for people in ICU with sepsis. So there may be some truth to this.
I think he's my mom. I was megadosed with vitamin c and other vitamins all of my childhood, now my immune system is shot. I honestly think it's damage from the huge amount of vitamins I had to take. Also, after a certain amount of any vitamin is absorbed into your body, your digestive system will throw the rest out when you urinate. That's why when you take a large does of vitamins, your urine is darker.
To be fair to him, when you're one of the only two double Nobel Prize winners in history, your mistakes get a lot more notice than other people's.
Al capone legendary gangster, died of syphilis with the brain age of a child. Sometimes karma does happen
He was. It all came down to what could be proven beyond reasonable doubt in a courtroom. He was definitely guilty of all the theft, murders, and other organized crime activities, but not conclusively. The money didn't lie.
Load More Replies...Oh please, he was never all that bright to begin with - he was just a freaking homicidal maniac that terrified his enemies.
I looked it up and it said that he did receive treatment. He was apparently one of the first Americans to receive penicillin for it, though by that time it was too late
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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.
The only ones following this AH were/are easily fooled. He's always been a pos and people treated him like the Messiah reborn. Fools and morons. The whole lot of them.
He's always been a massive crunt, he thinks using big words somehow makes you clever, it doesn't and in his case just makes you sound like a conceited pr1ck.
It doesn't help that he doesn't know what they mean.
Load More Replies...Nobody that paid attention to the things he said was surprised he assaulted women.
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.
His scenes are specially edited so you never properly see his fat gut. He also always wears a jacket to cover his completely out of shape torso in nearly every movie, no matter the character, same type of jacket, usually black. It's so obvious my friends and I would make jokes throughout his movie "did you get a glimpse", "yeh, just as he turned to fake kick", "oh, bad editing letting that one slip in". Don't get me wrong, I don't generally make fun of or have these types of opinions about anyone's body but he was such an egoic douche we couldn't ignore it.
Ha! Yes! 🤣 and you could tell when he was really out of shape in a movie because he would move like a grandpa and it would be edited like he'd do a spin kick, barely get his leg up, but the bad guy would go flying back like he was kicked by the Hulk 😆
Load More Replies...I love the snl story about how mad he was that hans and fronz worshiped Arnold and just kept saying he wished Arnold was there so he could kick his a$$
And Arnold nonchalantly said, "Is that so?" and took another puff on his cigar.
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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].
Would you google it and share a condensed version? I am a tad afraid.
Load More Replies...F**K this newspeak, it's called KILLED god damn it! Nothing wrong using words, snowflakes. Sticks and stones and such.. remember, or was that rhyme also cancelled, because it was too offensive?
I'm going with less an issue of being an idiot and more about some serious, untreated mental illness.
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.
He concentrated on the problem at hand and didn't consider the law of unintended consequences. Hubris, as the Greeks said.
Napoleon. Steamrolls europe, 6+ Times and suddenly forget logistics and Diplomacy where and when it matters the most.
After Napoleon, the French never again had much luck militarily. He used up a lot of Frenchmen. Did he burn through the gene pool or something?
Because he had steamrolled them 6+ times, the other side gave Napoleon no diplomatic options.
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.
I still have a knee-jerk reaction hearing this MF's name. My former best friend fell into an alt-right rabbit hole - to the point she condoned conversion therapy - and this fukko right here played a big role in it.
How do sane people fall into that alt-right rabbit hole? I guess they were never sane?
Load More Replies...Grifting rightwing dipshits is too easy and lucrative. Why have morals when you can instead sell books and s****y ties to dumbass incels and Joe Rogan fans?
I was cautious. I bought one of his books and paid for his personality test. I enjoyed some of his lectures. In all of these he was not far from the mark, IMHO. However, he thinks Joe Rogan is a genius and his opinions on sexuality are way out there and sometimes cruel. So yeah, no.
Just because you don't agree with somebody's politics doesn't make them an idiot. Genius is probably a bit of a stretch for Peterson, but he's no idiot. He knows exactly what he is doing.
What makes Peterson an idiot is the fact that he ignores the studies and research when the findings don't suit him and cherry picks the information when it does.
Load More Replies...A lot of his lectures are good... once he gets to the freaking point.
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.
This is a common experience for first time gamblers and casinos rely on it for a big part of their profits. Do some casinos fix the game this way when they spot a likely canditate? Guess....
I once stopped by a roulette table in Reno. I called my daughter and asked her "Tell me a number to put $5 on". "14" she says. I put $5 on 14 and 14 pops up. I decide to take half the winning ($5 x35 or something) and let it ride. 14 came out 4 times in a row. I walked out with the trip paid and $1200 in my pocket. Of course, I wanted to go back and bet on 14 everywhere, but I am smart enough to know it was a fluke.
Gonna put two out there I haven’t seen yet:
Scott Adams. While genius is a stretch, he was a successful cartoonist for years until his politics started coming out, and then the racist comments. Everyone thought he was taking on big business, then it all came tumbling down.
Second, and in a similar vein, the YouTuber Iiluminaughti. Built up an audience by criticizing shady business practices, turned out to be a horrible person who was guilty of shady business practices.
Yes. I used to like Dilbert. I stopped reading it when Adams went off the deep end.
...he never went off the deep end. his real self emerged publicly....it was always there..
Load More Replies...Ooof Illuminaughtii's story is a rough one, I was one of the people who appreciated her work until I started realizing her videos were just her reading out loud from wiki articles.
This. I enjoyed her videos until she got to a few topics I know extremely well and thought, wow. Her research and writing team really dropped the ball on this one. Then I started listening more critically and realized she doesn't care about quality at all. Then her "exposed" video came out and just yikes. It's like a Psych 101 example of DARVO
Load More Replies...Iilluminaughtii keeps making L's too. Like she could have actually apologized, said she has grown as a person and will do better and her audience would have forgiven her. Nope. She had to triple down and keep using frivolous lawsuits to silence her victims. BTW, her victims tend to be about 10 years her junior, barely legal when she met them. Soooooool many red flags.
Jeremy from Top Gear in the episode that he tied the log to the back of his car to traverse a tough road. Very quickly after mentioning his own genus, the log kicked up off a rock or something and shattered his back window.
Edit: Of course I know he’s not serious. The show is basically a comedy show. And 80% of what he says is dripping with sarcasm. Y’all need to chill TF out.
And in his newspaper columns and books.
Load More Replies...Not a genius but Laurence Fox went from being a very good actor to unhinged lunatic anti vaxxer who believes his own hype.
The only time he was in a show for more than a year was when he worked on "Lewis", which only existed because old people liked Kevin Whately after his time on "Inspector Morse" and John Thaw sadly lost his life to cancer. Nothing "Lozza" has done can be considered good. Even Billie Piper is embarrassed of their marriage.
Load More Replies...Mehmet Oz, cardiothoracic surgeon to shilling raspberry ketones on TV.
What about Dean R Koontz? Respected horror writer, became a born again Christian and just lost it. Even Stephen King has lamented his loss
How about Orson Scott Card (author of Ender's Game and other classic sci-fi books) turning out to be rabidly anti-gay?
Load More Replies...Surprised nobody mentioned Joe Paterno. Legendary American football coach who had been turning a blind eye to sexual abuse for years.
A lot of people who had success seem to think that makes them the beat person in the world, and the brightest, in every field. When the thruth is that we all are total rubbish in lots of things. Only, I - and probably not you - pretend to know everything and we know that we are not the best there is in every field of human acitvity.
Not ending up on lists like this is the only pro of the Matilda Effect, I guess
Fred W. Phelps - respected civil rights lawyer in 1960 & 1970s Kansas. Numerous awards and accolades from the NAACP and other civil rights groups for his work . And then the Westboro Baptist Church.
Not a genius but Laurence Fox went from being a very good actor to unhinged lunatic anti vaxxer who believes his own hype.
The only time he was in a show for more than a year was when he worked on "Lewis", which only existed because old people liked Kevin Whately after his time on "Inspector Morse" and John Thaw sadly lost his life to cancer. Nothing "Lozza" has done can be considered good. Even Billie Piper is embarrassed of their marriage.
Load More Replies...Mehmet Oz, cardiothoracic surgeon to shilling raspberry ketones on TV.
What about Dean R Koontz? Respected horror writer, became a born again Christian and just lost it. Even Stephen King has lamented his loss
How about Orson Scott Card (author of Ender's Game and other classic sci-fi books) turning out to be rabidly anti-gay?
Load More Replies...Surprised nobody mentioned Joe Paterno. Legendary American football coach who had been turning a blind eye to sexual abuse for years.
A lot of people who had success seem to think that makes them the beat person in the world, and the brightest, in every field. When the thruth is that we all are total rubbish in lots of things. Only, I - and probably not you - pretend to know everything and we know that we are not the best there is in every field of human acitvity.
Not ending up on lists like this is the only pro of the Matilda Effect, I guess
Fred W. Phelps - respected civil rights lawyer in 1960 & 1970s Kansas. Numerous awards and accolades from the NAACP and other civil rights groups for his work . And then the Westboro Baptist Church.
