Only fools would think Elon Musk is incompetent

Words: Noah Smith

Compile: Block unicorn

I am writing a rather long article, but it has taken two days and still not completed. During this time, I would like to share a rather ridiculous statement I recently saw: ‘Elon Musk is not smart. His IQ may be only around 100 or even lower. The reason he has achieved what he has today is entirely because he was born into a wealthy family and had extremely good luck.’

Of course, this statement is incorrect. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk scored 1400 on his second SAT exam in the late 1980s. SAT scores are highly correlated with IQ, and based on all the information I have found, a score of 1400 at that time corresponds to an IQ of over 130. In addition, Musk also holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and was accepted into a materials science PhD program in the 1990s. His intelligence level far exceeds that of the average person.

However, the absurdity of Abramson’s remarks lies not in their content, but in their purpose - he is trying to diminish the intelligence of Elon Musk to alleviate American society’s fear of Musk and his role in American politics. This approach is very foolish.

First of all, IQ is not an effective standard for measuring Musk’s best leadership abilities, such as organizing and improving companies, identifying talents, managing a large number of employees, raising funds, and creating and communicating future visions. Keuschnigg et al.‘s research (the flattening phenomenon of high-income earners’ cognitive abilities, 2023) found that after wealth reaches a high level, the role of IQ tends to flatten:

We analyzed the registration data from Sweden, including cognitive abilities and labor market performance of 59,000 men who participated in mandatory military service testing. Surprisingly, we found that although there is a strong overall relationship between ability and wages, the role of ability tends to plateau after an annual income exceeds 60,000 euros, only slightly higher than the average level by one standard deviation. The cognitive abilities of the top 1% income group are even slightly lower than those with slightly lower incomes.

In the past, Americans attached great importance to abilities that could not be measured by exams - real-world business acumen was often more respected than book knowledge. However, with the increasing importance of the knowledge industry and the rising power and status of the educated professional class, American society has begun to worship pure intelligence. Even those Americans who would insist that IQ is a racist and meaningless concept when pressed, would also readily call others ‘idiots’ or discuss their low IQ in social media debates.

However, regardless of Musk’s IQ, he has undoubtedly accomplished incredible feats of organization-building during his career. Here’s a quote from a post I wrote about Musk last October in which I described entrepreneurship as a superpower:

“While U.S. manufacturing (and manufacturing in countries like Germany and Japan) has been hollowed out by competition from China, and our great, established companies have faltered and declined, one entrepreneur has been able to build and scale large, cutting-edge, high-tech manufacturing companies in the U.S. that are leading the way around the world. That person is Elon Musk.”

Take SpaceX as an example. Without this Musk’s company, the United States would be far behind China in the space race. But with SpaceX, the United States is far ahead of China… And SpaceX is a manufacturing giant. Despite almost all manufacturing taking place in the United States, the company is able to surpass the entire manufacturing industry of China in its field… SpaceX has already launched so many Starlink communication satellites into low Earth orbit that Musk’s satellite constellation has exceeded the total of all other active satellites and spacecraft…

Other entrepreneurs have tried to enter the space industry. Jeff Bezos, the founder of the world’s top e-commerce website and cloud computing network, established Blue Origin, a company competing with SpaceX, but it is far behind…

But SpaceX is neither a fluke nor an exception. Despite increased competition recently, Tesla still completely dominates the U.S. electric car market… And when Musk recently set up a cluster of GPUs to train his new AI model, its speed far exceeded what NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun thought possible.

As an industrialist, Musk has been unparalleled in American history - the closest competitor to him, Henry Ford, also failed in the aerospace industry.

Seth Abramson cannot build anything like SpaceX, Tesla, or anything Musk has built, no matter how much money others give him. Dear reader, I can’t do it either, and neither can you. I don’t think Terence Tao or any other super genius mathematician on Earth can do it. Any one of us, even if we spend a lifetime and burn trillions of dollars, may not be able to create achievements anywhere close to Musk’s high-tech industrial giants.

Why do we fail? Even without any institutional barriers, we cannot identify the best managers and engineers. Even if we find them, we often cannot persuade them to work for us - and even if they come, we may not be able to motivate them to work hard every week. We also often fail to promote the best employees, give them more power and responsibility, or decisively dismiss underperformers. We cannot raise billions of dollars at preferential rates to fund the company. We cannot negotiate government contracts and create buzz for consumer products. And so on.

In addition, Musk may have done many less obvious things that we cannot do:

Marc Andreessen said that one key driver of Musk’s success is his relentless pursuit of rapid problem-solving, often working directly with engineers or programmers facing challenges… The legendary venture capitalist shared insights into his close collaboration with Musk at X, xAI, and SpaceX… Unlike many CEOs, Musk is committed to understanding every detail of his business, said the co-founder and general partner of A16Z. He ‘dives in, talks directly to the people doing the actual work,’ and acts as the ‘chief problem solver in the organization’.

For more than a decade, I have been observing how Musk successfully built seemingly impossible companies and pushed them to new heights of success. Each time, there were ridiculers on social media calling him a fool, fraud, and charlatan, claiming that his companies were about to collapse and fail. Although Musk did not fulfill every promise he had made, he repeatedly made those ridiculers eat their words.

Moreover, Musk achieved these achievements at a time when the entire system of proceduralism and anti-development policy in the United States was opposed to what he was doing. It is notoriously difficult to set up a factory in the U.S. due to the cost of land acquisition, procedural hurdles such as NEPA, regulations, high labor costs, and more. However, as of 2023, Tesla makes more cars in the U.S. than in China:

California is notoriously one of the most difficult states to set up a factory, yet SpaceX has built most of its rockets in the state — which are far better than anything made in China — almost single-handedly reviving the aerospace industry in the Los Angeles area. And when Musk wanted to build a data center for his new AI company, xAI — a process that typically takes several years — he reportedly completed it in just 19 days.

Contrary to Nate Silver’s view, these achievements have little to do with Elon’s IQ.

Some progressives still insist on mocking Musk’s intelligence, in part because the educated elite harbors traditional class resentments against industrial giants. But I think the more important reason is simply what young people call ‘coping mechanisms.’ Currently, Musk is applying all his talents used to build companies - motivating employees, avoiding red tape, and rapidly identifying and breaking through every bottleneck - to his efforts to reshape the American civil service system through DOGE. Telling oneself that Musk has no talent, or that he’s just lucky, or that he’s just a charlatan, or that his success is only due to government help, are all ways for progressives to comfort themselves, as they believe Musk’s efforts are doomed to fail.

Some people’s alternative way of dealing with Musk’s ‘blitzkrieg’ is to stubbornly believe that history is not driven by ‘great men’, but by slow and unstoppable forces:

Of course, history is extremely complex, and it only happens once, so historians cannot really know how much of history is driven by ‘great men’ and how much is driven by slow and unstoppable forces. When asked, they will admit this:

Pay attention to the key example of Genghis Khan. Of course, it was not only his decisions that influenced the course of history; many other steppe warlords had also tried to conquer the world but failed. Genghis Khan may have benefited from appearing at the right place at the right time, but he may have had organizational and motivational talents that made him the only person in history able to conquer so much territory.

Of course, Musk himself did not ignore this comparison:

Before you can’t help but mock Musk for misspelling ‘Khan’, remember that Genghis Khan himself couldn’t spell his own name, as he never learned to read and write - which vividly reminds us again that book knowledge and organizational talent are two very different things. Those who comfort themselves by saying that Musk will never conquer their country because he is not the most progressive person with the highest IQ in the world, are as foolish as the scholars of the 13th century who told themselves that their country would never be conquered by an illiterate riding a pony.

However, in addition to these “response mechanisms” and class biases, I believe there is another reason why some progressives try to call Musk a “fool.” Over the past 15 years, social media has replaced many people’s external realities in life, to the point where what happens on Twitter/X feels more real than what happens on the streets. In this condemning and insulting virtual world, the only way to attack and defeat someone is to constantly call them “stupid” and get many others to do the same. The idea is that if enough people simultaneously call someone “stupid,” then he is defeated, and you win. That’s why everyone on Twitter/X is always calling someone an idiot, fool, or similar words.

However, in the real world beyond that tiny X app on your phone, simply calling someone ‘stupid’ will not truly defeat them, just as Rachel Maddow’s badmouthing of Trump on MSNBC did not ‘destroy’ Trump. Perhaps saying that Musk’s IQ is only 110 might make you feel like you’ve defeated him in your own little fantasy world, but in the real world, he is still dismantling your national institutions at an astonishing speed.

Those who think that belittling Musk’s abilities will somehow defeat him or make him disappear are simply fools - not low IQ, but unwise people who make suboptimal responses to external challenges. In many important ways, Elon Musk is the most capable person in the United States, and denying this fact will only backfire.