November 9, 2021:
The owners were millionaires by inheritance. If not for rich papa they'd have been bag ladies.
I hadn't learned the lesson yet: that neither intelligence nor basic competency matter when people want to buy the thing you have for sale. In this case, blocks of oceanfront property in La Jolla.
That lesson came two decades later, in Silicon Valley, watching very brilliant yet equally incompetent entrepreneurs falter and flame in similar ways. Never realizing that as long as people bought the thing, it doesn't matter who to hire, or how much to pay them, or what the culture is, or the release schedule. Where trainwrecks of hyper-successful companies illustrate the principle.