As the article presents, Napoleon is considered one of the great military commanders in history. But he also did some pretty dumb shit leading the many deaths.
Someone can be smart and still be rotten. Someone can make money and still be a fraud morally.
But here, the myth of him as some singular genius falls apart the moment you look at how much of his reputation is built on other people’s work, lucky timing, and high-stakes gambling dressed up as vision.
The dumb stuff he does, but mostly the dumb stuff he says, does a good job of nullifying the 'smart' stuff.
So you’re romanticising a rich exploitative gambler who wouldn’t hesitate to sneer at 'ordinary' people, like us, as sheep.
he is more of an extremely driven and singularly lucky workaholic asshole with sufficient capacity to cram a lot of technical details (or drugs) into his head, which impressed and motivated technical staff (and investors), who then morphed into this Nazi creep as he got more populare he simply began to ignore negative feedback more and more (and obviously got addicted to the far-right echochamber)
I mean, surely it depends on the exact nature of the two things. Also, contrasting good with dumb strikes me as odd. Something can be good and dumb, or bad and smart.