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Scott Alexander’s review of a 2015 biography of Elon Musk. Elon Musk, to me, is one of the world’s most confusing people. He’s simultaneously both one of the smartest people in the world, creating billions of dollars of value in companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and one of the dumbest, in burning billions on Twitter. Scott’s review I think is a good explanation of what’s up with Musk.
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On twitter I have seen the likes of Cernovich and others claim Elon is among the smartest people on earth, if not the smartest. He's smart, no doubt, but to be among the smartest would put him in the company of Fields Medalists, math Olympiad and Putnam winners, math and physics doctorates, etc. Possible but very improbable, imho. He's smart but not that smart. He benefited from luck and good business savvy and intuition about markets, all necessary ingredients for business success. The Twitter Blue verification system did not stop spam, as I and others correctly predicted (when scammers can make $1000s in a day , how is $8 a deterrent). Maybe he was not smart enough to see that, or he did not care.
Elon is the smartest guy you know if you haven't met a brilliant person. Elon is more willing to be good friends with normies like Rogan & (no offense) Lex. So they keep fawning over him.
What makes Elon rare, is that he is simultaneously the world top 5 marketing professional, a competent poly-math, obsessive futurist, clearly narcissistic and rich as fuck. That combination is rare as fuck. You have to respect it.
Elon is not THAT smart (we're talking among a bunch of 99.99 percentiles ofc). But he is likely math-smarter than Zuck, Bezos, and Pichai. Larry Page & Bill Gates are likely math-smarter, but don't care about childish displays of intelligence. Nadella is IMO the most underrated and wisest of the lot. Jobs was weird enough to defy comparison.
I don’t think Musk is math-smarter than Bezos, everything I’ve read about him suggests the latter has an extraordinarily good analytic mind. Bezos suffered because of his own quasi-apocryphal tale about switching from physics to comp sci, but I think this says less about his IQ than some people seem to think. Musk is probably smarter than Zuck, although Zuck gets judged too harshly on his average Harvard grades. Gates is obviously by far the smartest of them all, and probably comfortably in the 99.99th percentile of g in the US (which would put him in the ten thousand smartest people in the country).
Neither Zuck nor Musk nor Bezos nor probably even Page are in the 99.99th percentile. Nadella is unclear, he didn’t go to one of the top IITs (as I understand it; the place he went to is ranked like 20th, then he went to UW Madison and then did an MBA) and his academic record isn’t stunning, but he obviously has done a lot with his career.
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The highest IQ people in the world are probably disproportionately clustered at top math departments in first-class universities around the world. Most of them are likely not even millionaires. I think raw intellectual ability is important, obviously, but you need a much wider set of talents to be truly astonishingly successful and clearly Elon has them.
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