Some people are just orders of magnitude smarter than the rest of us. Look at Kim.com, how was this guy able to run a series of companies, become a multimillionaire and be the #1 rated Call of Duty player in the world? I can hardly manage holding down a job, and coaching my kid's soccer team!
I know Kim because I interviewed with his company "Data Protect" in Munich in person.
He was a hero back then in infosec and kids like me were told by "the Internet elders" that if you want to make it in InfoSec you have to work for Dataprotect ... "because this is a company where the boss flies to work with his helicopter". I was young and easy to impress and this kind of talk was even echoed by fyodor @ insecure.org so it wasn't just idiots like myself who believed it.
When I met him and his other German partner in September 2000 at his swanky office in Nymphenburgerstraße all my alarm bells rang because they had literally cartoon cut-outs of Kim and posters of Kim everywhere plastered around the office.
Kim is a genius in managing his brand but he isn't a hacker, in fact his questions in the interview were so lame that I felt really disappointed. Later it turned out that he hasn't even done the credit card hacks that he used to say he did. Instead he made his money with insider trading and ponzi schemes during the dot-com bubble which was the reason why he did a runner and why German authorities wanted him for so long.
Kim isn't a technology genius, he is just a really good con-man (oh btw his real name is "Kimble Schmitz", which sounds way less cool than Kim Dotcom).
> Kim is a genius in managing his brand but he isn't a hacker
He was the butt of all jokes on IRC hacker circles for years - the crazy eccentric guy who would threaten to hack and ping DoS everyone and have a meltdown. He is/was essentially a charlatan and snake oil salesman who never proved any actual skill
That he has come so far in terms of being respected by anybody is bemusing
