Actually, he seems to me somewhat like a semi-delusional dreamer. Lot of posts in this account for it to be a joker. You'd have to really want to pull our collective legs to rack up 500-odd posts. I spend a lot of time in the startup world and sold my first startup last year. I hear pitches from people like this all the time.
You run into a ton of people with a somewhat tenuous grasp of reality and an unrealistic sense of self in the startup world. It's acceptable to be a "crazy dreamer" as a startup founder, because most entrepreneurs (especially many famous ones) seemed to start out that way. Unfortunately, this tends to attract a certain type of person who is "too smart for this world" and who "just needs a chance to prove how right I am and how wrong everyone else is." They jump from one epiphany to the next, always with some harebrained scheme that the "rubes" could never understand but is "so obvious if only you were as smart as I am." Yesterday they were a beginner, but today they're an expert. Since they're always rewriting their personal history in their heads, this never seems absurd to them.
Their ideas tend to froth up and die regularly; they're almost never executed; and they're completely immune to criticism. Talking to them is similar to arguing with a conspiracy theorist, except they're kind of making up their own conspiracy and then believing in it. The confirmation bias is so extreme that it's hard to believe that they're not pulling your leg, but they really do believe it.
After you hear enough of these delusional pitches, you develop a bit of a feel for it, but there's a great objective test, too: these "entrepreneurs" rarely have track records of accomplishment in anything---just a lot of aborted schemes. Actually building a company (or getting your PPL, or soloing, etc.) requires too much interaction with the real world and too many obstacles created by "lesser" people.
I think AZ got bit by the flying bug and has convinced himself of a lot of unrealistic things. This comment is
exactly like the kind of thing I hear from delusional startup pitches: "You guys have to understand something. In the world I come from, an airplane is just another piece of business equipment and is expensed as such. It takes no more precedence over a combine, 4WD tractor. . . ." That is to say,
in the world AZ wants to live in, owner-flown GA aircraft are like tractors. In AZ's mind that
is the world, though, and he's playacting out a reality in which that is the case. We can point out the fallacies of this argument forever, but it won't accomplish anything. We're just actors in his fantasy.
He's also doing a lot of playacting here, pretending to be a great businessman and tax genius, and he's got sockpuppets to playact at being a macho pilot. Over in the icing thread (
https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/com...-good-stories-you-care-to-share.102378/page-3) you can see him forget to log in with his "Alex Siemens" account when responding to an incredulous comment on "Alex's" icing encounter post. It seems pointless until you realize that he's playing out fantasies on this board with himself, testing out how real pilots will react to things. That's all factoring into his delusions in a real way.
I've seen entrepreneurs lie about having started companies, lie about their exits, and even what they're doing now, even when it's obvious they'll be caught in the lie. In their own heads, though, it
might as well be true because if it just weren't for all the idiots in the world, they
would have done it. In their own minds, pretending is
almost as good as doing, because it's
effectively true, and they're learning how to better play the part for when they inevitably hit it big.
