It's pretty sad how many intelligent people end up bringing no good to the world

I'm reading a book right now, Goebbels by Peter Longerich which is a biography of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.

Alongside the obvious tragedy of what occurred to their victims, it is rather sad how such prodigious intellectual gifts are used in the pursuit of destruction. Goebbels had a PhD and was clearly very intelligent as I can tell from his writings (Longerich predicates the book on excerpts from Goebbels's diary). Same with Hitler, who had a prodigious memory and was hyperintelligent.

Or Elon Musk, who has enough money and enough intellectual ability that he could be anything. He could do anything. Instead he's taking a sledgehammer to his own image. I'm not even sure if he's happy in life.

edit: Just another thing I've thought.

Perhaps intelligent people find it much easier to justify their own malfeasance? Like in the case of Jimmy Savile, who was the presenter of Top of the Pops on the BBC amongst other things. He was determined to have an IQ of 150 and was a member of Mensa. He was a Catholic but also a serial pedophile, which was revealed after his death in 2011. In his interviews he used to muse about how (with retrospect it becomes rather less oblique) he hopes in the end the credit side outweighs the debit side in life and that sometimes one cannot help the desires of the flesh. He gave tens of millions to charity, probably what he saw as the credit side. He died with his fingers crossed.