you said: >Didn't he also make a lot of money already? So at least also good at making money.

The second sentence is in the present tense. Implying that Altman is currently good at making money and thus not out of touch.

I said

>When Howard Hughes was at his most batshit crazy and generally out of touch with anything resembling humanity his businesses kept being profitable, perhaps once you have a lot of money it is difficult to really screw it up.

I shall now laboriously break this down in case you have not followed my reasoning.

when I say >his businesses kept being profitable

This implies that they were profitable before he was

>at his most batshit crazy and generally out of touch with anything resembling humanity

Thus my example is of someone who was once not out of touch and made money, but then when they became out of touch they kept making money because their businesses had reached such a size and reach that they were able to make money for him without him being 'in touch'.

I did not say one could be out of touch and go from nothing to money, I said that there was an example of someone who was once 'in touch' but became out of touch and yet they continued to make money.

The criticism of Altman here that I'm reading is that he 'is' out of touch, not that he has always been out of touch. It is in fact a common criticism of very rich people that they lose contact to daily life and the critical understanding of that life that allowed them to become rich in the first place.

Thus your response that he is good at making money is meant to show that he cannot be so out of touch after all (at least this is what I supposed your intention to be and it would seem to be born out by this conversation)

This is why my example of Hughes is a good example of what I wanted to say, which is that just because someone IS good at making money they can still BE out of touch, and not anything else.

Reading the comments again, by "making money" I did not mean earning money like the crazy guy still having an income from assets he acquired in the past, but being able to make new deals, start successful companies and so on.

But I understand what you mean. I disagree that "rich people becoming out of touch/crazy" is as likely as you make it sound. But of course it is possible.

Nevertheless, usually there is only the track record of their past to evaluate a persons authority. You can add a small discount for "may have gone crazy", and of course attribute the luck factor, but that's it.