I wrote the following quip to a friend the other day, <iq>Charisma is an <i>underrated</i> stat,</iq> to which they replied quite pithily, <bq>Charisma is underrated in the engineering space. A charismatic engineer is often labeled as a "charlatan" or "all bark no bite" or "a sales guy", but what the people who say that often gloss over is the fact that <b>a charismatic engineer is often really labeled as a CEO.</b></bq> <img attachment="charisma_20+.jpg" align="right" caption="Charisma 20+">Perhaps a better word than "underrated" is "unnoticed". It's the stat that hides itself. Part of the power of charisma is that people don't notice that it's working on them. They are also definitionally unable to credit it when they think it's <i>not</i> working on them. Charisma's effect is to draw attention to the subject, but it doesn't control whether that attention is positive or negative. Charisma lives by the old adage: "There is no such thing as bad publicity." I offer a former and once-again president as proof: Trump. The man has, undeniably, a ton of charisma. It works on everyone, in that no-one thinks of what he does in terms of charisma (the stat hides itself). The effects vary from devotion/fealty to him to revulsion/fealty to bringing him down. Either way, his charisma is so strong that there are only a handful who don't allow their strong opinion of him to sway how they feel about what he does. Far too many people have changed their politics, and even lives because of him. Many credit him with laughably too much power and purpose, but they differ on whether they're full MAGA and loving it or full RESISTANCE and dedicating every one of their clever tweets to bringing him down. The excrescence that is Musk is in the same ballpark. Just because I called Musk an "excrescence" doesn't mean that his charisma works on me. I honestly never really cared that much about him, one way or the other. I don't see a huge difference between him and any of the other self-selected, tech-billionaire overloads to whom our society considers it useful to grant most of its wealth, and hence, power. I honestly just wanted to show off with a ten-dollar-word.