Did Jeff Bezos get lucky?

This is a dual author post by me and my daughter Lulu.

I was watching Elliot's screencast "Tutoring InternetRules #10" when I heard something I thought my kids would definitely be interested to hear. 

During the bit that I thought was interesting, Elliot said that Jeff Bezos is not smart (and that he didn't investigate it much). (This wasn't the thing that I thought my kids would find interesting.)

Lulu had a question: "So he got lucky [in creating a multi-billion dollar company]?"

I didn't have an immediate answer and I also didn't want to speak for Elliot's perspective. I recommended that she ask Elliot. She told me to ask. So I said I would, and I had ideas on how to do it such that she would get answers for her context rather than my context. (My solution is to clarify to my audience that this is Lulu's question.)

Now for my thinking on the subject. There was some luck but luck isn't enough. I think Jeff's social climbing skills/work had a contributory effect re making amazon into the huge company it is today. Many people would read this and think that doing social climbing stuff is good. I think that's confused. It's using the logic of maximizing local optima (money) to the detriment of maximizing global optima (whole life). So like if Jeff avoided social climbing stuff, he would have had less money but a better life overall.