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Jeroboam's list wasn't cherry-picking. It's literally a list of the richest Americans.
But let's expand it to Britain and see what we get.
So we have one aristocrat, a mixture or working and middle class backgrounds, and a few inheritors of family businesses. Seems to me like IQ is the main factor here. Even those who inherited their wealth have demonstrated their high IQ through successfully managing large businesses, and of course, IQ is arguably more heritable than wealth, since wealth can be squandered in a way brain cells can't.
Also, from the new Scientist article you posted:
On the surface, Zagorsky’s analysis confirms the findings of previous studies linking higher intelligence with higher income. “Each point increase in IQ test scores is associated with $202 to $616 more income per year,” he says. For example, a person with a score of 130 (in the top 2%, in terms of IQ) might earn about $12,000 more per year than someone with an average IQ score of about 100.
On the surface, people with higher intelligence scores also had greater wealth. The median net worth for people with an IQ of 120 was almost $128,000 compared with $58,000 for those with an IQ of 100.
But when Zagorsky controlled for other factors – such as divorce, years spent in school, type of work and inheritance – he found no link between IQ and net worth. In fact, people with a slightly above-average IQ of 105 , had an average net worth higher than those who were just a bit smarter, with a score of 110.
So IQ predicts both earnings and wealth, but goes away when you control for years spent in school (a consequence of IQ), type of work (a consequence of IQ), divorce (a consequence of IQ) and inheritance (which obviously correlates with IQ, since you need a high IQ to earn enough to pass on a significant amount to your children).
That study controls away the very thing it's supposed to be measuring.
It's also worth noting the AFQT is not designed as an IQ test: at the upper extreme, as you might expect for a vocational test, its ability to predict IQ decreases. It's not made to measure fluid intelligence above 125 or so. See e.g. https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/smpy/2004-frey.pdf (figure 1A).
A restatement of your point: the very reason the military uses the ASVAB is that it is highly predictive of success in career placement. It is silly to take an instrument explicitly designed to measure likelihood of success, control away success, and then claim it doesn't (as much) predict success after your controls.
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