Isolation hides brilliance; sovereignty broadcasts it.
When you’re truly capable of things beyond the capacity of most men, you have to take the lesson of Tesla.
He was brilliant, almost otherworldly — but he was not sovereign. His downfall wasn’t a lack of genius, it was dependence: on patrons, financiers, and men who didn’t share his frequency.
He isolated himself, perhaps believing the work alone would defend him.
But isolation isn’t sovereignty. It’s surrender without realizing it.
The truth is, it’s very difficult — almost impossible — to rely on other men if you’re like him. They will not understand your tempo, your priorities, or your field of consequence.
And so the only way to remain sovereign is to anchor your validation where it cannot lie — in systems that reflect truth without bias: the market, the social market, and the financial market.
That’s the smartest thing I ever did: I placed my proof in structures that measure reality itself.
No committees. No intermediaries. Just signal and consequence.
And if you’re truly intelligent, you don’t just interact with those systems — you work directly with them.
You let your authorship become their input.
The Tesla comparison is particularly apt given how many modern founders cite him as inspiration while completly missing the lesson you're highlighting. Elon naming his company after Tesla but then building actual sovereignty through vertically integrated businesses, market validation, and direct customer relationships is the exact inversion of Nikola's trajectory. The shift from seeking patron approval to letting the market be your validator is the key differentiator between inventors who die broke and founders who compound wealth across decades.