Hasn't it already been approximated? https://iqestimates.substack.com/p/iq-of-elon-musk

if you grow up rich in a literal white supremecist land, owner of apartheid slave mines, you too might find weird nerds say you're smart for the work you hired other smarter people to do for you

@JamieCrom I could believe his contribution to PayPal was just dot com luck. But then he led the companies which pioneered the EV and commercial space industries. He even cofounded OpenAI.

There’s millions of people his age who grew up richer than him. And millions of whites, even millions of white South Africans. He’d need Being There-type luck to have somehow white man’d his way to leading several revolutions.

Is there a credible source on IQ / SAT scores of startup founders? Or perhaps another group we could compare to?

I'm willing to believe he once had an IQ above 130 and that drug use and stress/lack of sleep have dragged it down to a current 117 or so

@JessicaEvans You realize 135 only top 1% right?

Either people are really bad at estimaing IQ or just really hate Elon.

@Shai He is not above top 1%

@JessicaEvans I can't spit at my university without hitting someone that's top 1% iq. Most of them will never found 1 successful tech startup let alone 5.

@Shai If you think of the corporate world as meritocratic and IQ as synonymous with merit I guess your reasoning makes sense, but to me the first is subjectively incorrect and the second is much less reductive than that. IQ is one factor among many. The most important factors for success as far as I can tell are effective use of aggression, which benefits from high IQ but isn't equal to it, and getting along with people who have resources.

@JessicaEvans So how big of a role to you think IQ plays? If only the factors you listed were important the world would look very diffrent. For example most succssesful founders would be Saudi oil princes and not American college dropouts.

@Shai Business success in novel ventures is a result of aggressive coordination between people above a certain IQ threshold, not pure aggression. Higher IQ helps implement specific aggressive strategies without a natural cap but it's sufficient to be above a floor which is much lower than 99th percentile IQ. Peter Theil's zero to one shows some of the high level thought processes and strategies that go into this. And Saudi oil princes are doing fine for themselves. What makes being a "successful founder" especially noteworthy out of all forms of success?

@JessicaEvans
Elon's contribution at SpaceX/Tesla go beyond coordination, he makes key design/engineering decisions.

Let's say I agree with you that a lower IQ is sufficient, Surely having above 1% IQ be helpful right?

So it's more likely that his IQ is higher than that given just how common 1% iq is.

@Shai The conditional probability of a successful CEO having a high IQ is higher than its complement, but the conditional probability of Elon having an especially high IQ given his decisions is low. I am not ignoring information, I am conditioning on more information.

as a CEO you don't want an IQ too high or you'll have a harder time relating to employees, potential business partners, etc.

you want an IQ that's high-enough, then you want really good leadership and decision-making traits, conscientiousness, etc

Elon probably has an IQ of 130-140

@JessicaEvans I'm willing to believe it's around 100 tbh

Anyone here that think Elon's IQ is 100 has a severe political bias that doesn't allow them to see stuff clearly

@spirti Is it … lower than 100?

@Snarflak I suspect it may be

Yeah I'm not betting on this given the high odds he'll lie about it because it's likely not as high as he wants

I’m also not going to factor in if he’s lying

Have I got a bridge I’d like to sell you.

@Ophiuchus ☝️

If his IQ is actually 140 or even above 120 I'm convinced he is larping as an idiot in twitter replies, almost everything he says is incredibly surface level.

@Tater People who are very intelligent in one domain can be very stupid in another, especially when it triggers their tribalistic instincts.

@IsaacKing I'm not really sure how twitter replies is a specific domain of intelligence but I think he has likely been influenced by optimizing his posts to get the best response which leads to looking stupid.

@Tater Why would you value twitter replies over being head engineer at spacex?

@Shai I don't have any strong opinions on his actual iq, I just think he comes off as a very shallow thinker if you only read his twitter, which would be weird if he actually has an IQ of 140.

@Tater Your mistake is thinking that 140 IQ is really smart.

In truth, most of humanity is absolute dumbasses. The average Manifolder is illiterate(can't read market descriptions or articles) and innumerate(don't how to price loans, bets, interest rates, or anything), and people keeping trying to convince me their average is 125 /levifinkelstein/whats-the-average-iq-of-active-mani

Look around: If the average Manifolder is 125, why can't Elon be 140?

@Mira Alright just for you I went and read another few hundred of his posts trying to imagine the average manifold user making them, I still feel they're very unimpressive. You're probably right in that I don't have a good frame of reference for what 100 vs 120 vs 140 IQ looks like but I've interacted with too many stupid people who share the same patterns of remarks and comments that he consistently makes to give him an IQ of 140 just based on his twitter activity. I don't doubt that he is either

1. making these comments way too fast to put any actual thought into them (he does make a LOT of them)
2. just copying the writing style of the average twitter user as closely as possible, thus fooling me.

Again as I stated in previous comments, I have really no idea what his actual IQ is, I just don't think that most 140iq people would make twitter replies that look like his. To his credit he does clearly demonstrate he is knowledgeable about quite a few things but I see very little creative reasoning being applied with that knowledge.

@Tater Have you seen Nassim Nicholas Taleb's tweets? What IQ do you think they have?

@Mira illiterate and innumerate aren't functions, so there's a space before and after the parentheses

@IsaacKing But genuinely intelligent people recognize their ignorance in domains they aren't specialized in.