If a famous medical doctor was trying to convince me that his database product was really the best, while making grandiose statement, i think i'd be very very harsh with them.
However, I wouldn't limit this to being a "genius" thing -- there may actually be something significant to being able to apply knowledge and patterns in one or more field to a seemingly unrelated field, and people who tend to be interested enough to learn and think about a lot of different fields in depth have a better base of mental abstractions for inventing in a new field, even if they don't score ridiculously high on an IQ test.
Note that this is just a general rant -- re: the article, I don't think the pitch is particularly interesting or noteworthy.
He's quite involved with technical decisions. His social media behavior is irrelevant here -- this is about the ability to innovate outside of physics or economics, which is what he learned about in college.
Wait what? Despite the pandemic?
Why limit it to them? Without the Internet, there would have been no X.com, no PayPal, no billion dollar paycheck. If "funding" a large project is the equivalent of "being a scientific genius", I think we'll add a lot of geniuses to the books, and we should probably include every government official that makes decisions about funding large projects.
And really ... who deserves more credit for putting a man on the moon than Karl Marx? Without Marx no communism, without communism no Soviet Union, without SU no American fear of losing dominance, and without that no ambitious and well-funded space program.
On some topics you just have to accept that someone who has spent years of their live dedicated to a complex topic might actually be better placed to judge a solution than someone who specialises in an entirely unrelated field but happens to demonstrate a passing interest. Particularly when the topic is literally a matter of life or death.
A better stance would be to take such pitches as an interesting take but one which still requires peer review.
Edit: Remember when Musk tried to pitch a submarine to save those children stuck in a Thai cave and how local divers have to point out the passage ways were too narrow for even Musks child size sub? Being smart doesn’t mean you are equality qualified to resolve hard problems in other people’s fields.
He was smart to avoid the typical tech guy hiring only a bunch of other tech guys to try and take on problems like hunger, global health, and education.
So don't be so surprised, these aren't necessarily junior level devs at FAANG spouting off.