Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday.
Eh, I despise Musk and believe he is a grave threat.
But this “Musk isn’t smart” narrative is a waste of time and underestimating Musk makes him more dangerous.
Tesla was a nothing burger company before he acquired it. SpaceX has been highly successful under his leadership. Musk may not have provided much technical knowledge, but he’s accomplished too much for it to be random luck, and steering such companies, even if not on a daily basis, is going to require applied intellectual skill.
Edit: guys you can downvote all you want but underestimating Musk just weakens your position and aids him. You’re not going to an Ivy League school with average or below intelligence.
You’re also not starting and guiding various companies to high level success if you’re dumb. Yes Musk has failed projects. Essentially every company and many if not most entrepreneurs have suffered failures.
Allegedly he also got a relatively high SAT score (1400) according to Isaacson, a respected biographer (I’d want to see hard proof however).
Musk’s IQ is probably something like 125, not 160. But it’s not going to be 90 or other like that.
But I guess you can go ahead and play into his hand and boost him by underestimating him.
SpaceX was the leading private space company before he acquired it - it has actually lost ground to competitors since then but has an extremely passionate team behind it.
Tesla was the first company to seriously take a swing at automated response with an eye to FSD - they’ve since fallen far behind Waymo and other competitors.
When Musk worked at PayPal Thiel described him as a crazy risk taker and had him ousted as CEO while he was on two weeks of PTO for his honeymoon.
Musk is a huge fucking dumbass with enough money to fail horribly over and over.
you’re not getting into UPENN being a complete idiot. Whoever started the company, Musk oversaw periods of the growth in SpaceX, Tesla, Paypal etc.
Musk is (edit: not) the smartest person in the world like he thinks he is. But it’s nearly an objective fact that he’s not stupid.
This is such a dumb hill to die on, and more importantly it benefits Musk.
edit: and as for failed programs, welcome to the world of business. Google, Amazon, Microsoft Apple, etc. constantly launch ideas that don’t pan out. Are their leaders and engineers and everyone else dumb because a project failed?
Imma quote from the article.