I’m writing a longer article, but it’s taking two times, so in the meantime, here is one of the more absurd assertions I’ve seen late:
This assertion is bad, of course. According to author Walter Isaacson, Elon got , a 1400 on the SAT , in the late 1980s, on his second attempt. According to all the resources I can discover, an SAT score of 1400 at the time would have about corresponded to an IQ of mid-130s. SAT ratings and IQ are very correlated. Elon was accepted into a PhD program in materials technology in the 1990s despite having a bachelor’s degree in physics. He is a person of well above average imagination.
But that’s not why Abramson’s speech is therefore absurd. The explanation it’s ironic is not its content but its , purpose , — it represents an attempt to reduce the government’s concern of Elon Musk and his part in American elections by calling him ridiculous. This is a , very , dumb thing to try to accomplish.
First of all, IQ is never a great measure of ability at the kind of stuff Elon is best at — developing and improving businesses, identifying skills, managing large numbers of people, funding, creating and communicating a vision for the future, and so on.  , Keuschnigg et cetera. ( 2023 )  , find that IQ tends to plateau at high levels of wealth:
We use the data from the Finnish registry, which includes information on the mental abilities and job-market accomplishment of 59, 000 men who were subject to a military conscription requirement. Remarkably, we find that the connection between potential and wage is solid overall, but above €60, 000 per year ability plateaus at a reasonable level of 1 standard deviation. The income-strung individuals who are in the top 10 % also have a significantly lower cognitive ability score.
Americans once valued abilities over those that can be measured on a check because they were used to evaluate their own skills in the past. But as expertise industries grew in importance and the , highly educated professional class , rose in strength and notoriety, the land began to worship at the shrine of natural eloquence.
Yet many Americans who, if you put them on the spot, had vehemently disagree that having a high IQ is a racist and irrelevant concept will immediately engage in conversation with or discuss their lower IQ in a social media debate.
And yet whatever his IQ is, Elon has unquestionably accomplished incredible feats of organization-building in his career. In a post about Musk that I wrote in October, I referred to entrepreneurialism as a kind of superpower.
Even as American manufacturing ( and German manufacturing, and Japanese manufacturing, etc. ) has been hollowed out by Chinese competition and our great old companies have  , stumbled , and , declined,  , one single entrepreneur , has been able to build and scale gigantic new cutting-edge high-tech world-beating manufacturing companies in the United States of America. Elon Musk, that one man.
Consider SpaceX. Without this one Musk company, America would be significantly in the space race. But with SpaceX included, the US is far , ahead , of China…And SpaceX is a manufacturing powerhouse. Despite doing almost all of its manufacturing in the United States, the company has been able to , outmanufacture all of China , in its field…SpaceX has already launched so many Starlink communication satellites into low Earth orbit that Musk’s constellation]of satellites ] now , outnumbers all other active satellites and spacecraft combined …
It’s not as if other businesspeople haven’t tried their hands at space. Jeff Bezos, creator of the world’s premier e-commerce site and the world’s top cloud computing network, founded Blue Origin, a SpaceX competitor, but , it lags far behind …
However, SpaceX is neither a ruse nor a special case. Despite a recent modest increase in competition, Tesla still , utterly dominates the market , for electric vehicles in the U. S…And when Elon recently set up a cluster of GPUs to train his new AI model,  , it was done far faster , than Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believed possible [. ]
As an industrialist, Elon is unmatched by any American in the country’s entire history — Henry Ford, his closest competitor for the title, failed in the aerospace industry.
Seth Abramson could not build SpaceX, or Tesla, or any of the things Musk has built, no matter how much money someone handed him. Neither could I, dear reader, and neither could you. Neither, I think, could Terence Tao, or any of the other highest-IQ supergenius mathematicians on the planet. Any of us could burn a trillion dollars over the course of our lifetimes and not end up with anything that remotely resembles Musk’s high-tech industrial behemoths.
Why would we fail? We would fail to identify the best managers and engineers even with no institutional constraints in our way. Even when we did find them, we would frequently be unable to persuade them to work for us, and even if they did, we might not be able to motivate them to put in a lot of effort each week.
We’d also often fail to elevate and promote the best workers and give them more authority and responsibilities, or ruthlessly fire the low performers. To fund our businesses, we would fail to raise tens of billions of dollars at favorable rates. We wouldn’t be successful in negotiating government contracts and driving consumer interest. And so on.
And there are probably lots of other, less obvious things that , Musk does , that we would fail to do:
A key driver of]Musk’s ] success is a relentless focus on solving problems fast, often by working directly with the engineers or coders who’ve gotten stuck, Marc Andreessen says…The , legendary venture capitalist , shared his insights from working closely with Musk on X, xAI, and SpaceX… Unlike many CEOs, Musk is , devoted , to understanding every aspect of his businesses, the Andreessen Horowitz cofounder and general partner said. He serves as the “lead problem solver in the organization” and is “in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work.”
For more than ten years, I’ve watched Elon succeed in creating seemingly impossible businesses and propelling them to new heights of success. And at every turn, there were hecklers on social media calling him an idiot, a fraud, and a huckster, and claiming that his companies were about to collapse and die. Elon has repeatedly made his hecklers eat their words, despite not breaking every promise he has ever made.
And Elon did it despite the fact that the entire apparatus of American pro-growth and anti-development policy was ineffective against what he was trying to accomplish. It’s famously difficult to build factories in America, thanks to land acquisition costs, procedural barriers like NEPA, regulation, high labor costs, and so on. Tesla still produced more cars in America in 2023 than it did in China.
California is renowned for being one of the hardest states to build in, but SpaceX makes the majority of its rockets there, almost alone, reviving the aerospace industry in the Los Angeles area. And when Elon wanted to set up a data center for his new AI business, xAI, he reportedly did it in 200-gpus-process-normally-takes-4-years”>19 days, according to reports. 2
Contra , Nate Silver, none of this really has much to do with Elon’s IQ.
The traditional class resentment of the shabby educated elite toward the wealthy titans of industry is a reason some progressives still insist on sneering at Elon’s intellect. However, I believe that much of it is merely the kids ‘” cope” or” cope.”
Elon is currently putting all of the same skills he used to create his businesses, including motivating employees, avoiding red tape, identifying and overburdening every bottleneck at breakneck speed, to his effort to remake the US civil service with DOGE.
Progressives find comfort in the idea that Elon’s efforts will inevitably fail by telling themselves that he doesn’t really have any talent, that he just gets lucky, that he’s just a huckster, or that he only succeeds because of government assistance.
Another way that some people have coped with Elon’s blitz is to , stubbornly insist , that history is moved not by “great men”, but by slow and inexorable forces:
Of course, history is extremely complex, and only happens once, and so historians can’t really know how much of history is driven by “great men” vs. slow, inexorable forces. 3 , When pressed,  , they will admit this:
Note the key example of Genghis ( Chinggis ) Khan. Other steppe warlords tried to conquer the world but were unsuccessful, not just his choices, which had an impact on the course of history. Although Genghis may have had the advantage of being in the right place at the right time, he probably had organizational and motivational skills that made him uniquely positioned to conquer more territory than any other person in history. 4
The comparison, of course, is , not lost on Elon himself:
Remember that Genghis Khan, who had never learned to read or write, was a master of the spelling of his own name, a stark reminder that organizational skills and book learning are two very different things before you’re tempted to sneer at Elon for missing the word” Khan.”
Progressives who concoct themselves that Elon could never conquer their nation because he doesn’t possess the highest IQ in the world are just as foolish as a 13th-century scholar who declared that an illiterate man riding a pony could never conquer his nation.
Beyond all the coping and classism, I believe there is another reason why some progressives try to refer to Elon as a dummy. Over the past 15 years, mass social media has replaced outside reality in many people’s lives, so that things that happen on Twitter/X feel more substantial than things that happen in the streets.
The only way to attack and defeat someone in this virtual world of constant denunciations and insults is to use the word “dumb” a lot and get a lot of other people to use the word “dumb” at the same time. The idea is that if enough of you call someone “dumb” at the same time, then he’s defeated, and you win. This is why Twitter/X users are constantly referring to someone as an idiot, a dunce, or some other similar term.
Except that in the real world beyond the little X app on your phone, simply calling someone “dumb” does , not , actually defeat them, any more than Rachel Maddow actually , “destroys Trump”  , when she says mean things about him on MSNBC.
Maybe saying that Elon has a 110 IQ makes you feel like you beat him in your little online fantasy world, but out there in the actual world, he is still , ripping up your national institutions , at breakneck speed.
People who believe that denying Elon’s abilities will somehow dethrone him or cause him to vanish are simply fools because they have low IQ and are simply foolish people who don’t respond well to an external challenge. Elon Musk is, in many important ways, the single most capable man in America, and we deny that fact at our peril.
Notes:
1 The late Jim Simons is one possible exception. But probably not even him.
2 We should also consider why we built a system where only one man is capable of all this while a large number of slightly less capable entrepreneurs are also capable of doing the same things. But that’s a topic for another post.
3 As with many humanities disciplines,  , historians tend to mistake , the current consensus within their field for objective truth.
4 I recommend Frank McLynn’s book ,” Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy”  , as a good introduction to this history, along with Dan Carlin ‘s , podcast series on the Mongols. A lot of people enjoy Jack Weatherford ‘s ,” Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World“, but while it’s definitely the most fun of the bunch, I think it’s a bit too hagiographic of the Mongols.
This , article was first published on Noah Smith’s Noahpinion , Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion , subscriber , here.