For months, an internet-wide guessing game has swirled around the question of where Elon Musk’s intelligence falls on the bell curve. President Trump has called Musk a “seriously high IQ individual.” Musk’s onetime biographer Seth Abramson wrote on X that he would “peg his IQ as between 100 and 110,” and claimed that there was “zero evidence in his biography for anything higher.” The economics commentator Noah Smith estimated Musk’s IQ at more than 130, a number gleaned from his reported SAT score. A circulating screenshot shows Fox News has pegged the number at 155, citing Sociosite, a junk website. The pollster Nate Silver guessed that Musk is “probably even a ‘genius,’” and theorized that he may not always appear that way because, as he put it on X, “high IQs serve as a force multiplier for both positive and negative traits.”
When we speculate about Musk’s IQ, what are we really talking about?
Not his score on an intelligence test; if he has ever taken such a test, its results have not been made public. His “IQ” is instead extrapolated from his success, his wealth, his biography and his personal presentation. Assigning him a high number serves to explain his vertiginous rise in the technology industry and, now, the government. The reasoning circles around and around. He has money and power, so he must be smart; he has a lot of money and power, so he must be very smart.
When Trump posed with Musk outside the White House in March, a makeshift Tesla dealership assembled on the lawn, the president implored Americans to buy the cars and secure the relationship between Musk’s intelligence and his success. “We have to take care of our high IQ people,” he said, “because we don’t have too many of them.”
For more than a century, psychologists have debated the extent to which an IQ test is capable of measuring a person’s inherent intellect (and if such a thing even exists). Now, “IQ” has been uncoupled from the test itself and loosed in the discourse to lend a scientific sheen to the consolidation of a new political elite.
IQ is the term of choice for the man who doesn’t just think he’s smart, but thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. Americans have long been obsessed with IQ, and the human rankings it facilitates, but rarely is that fixation stated so plainly, so incessantly, and at such high levels. To some of our most powerful people, IQ has come to stand in as the totalizing measure of a person — and a justification for the power that they claim.
Trump has spent much of his second term sorting humans into “low IQ individuals” (Kamala Harris, Representative Al Green) and “high IQ individuals” (cryptocurrency boosters, Musk, Musk’s 4-year-old son).
But a wider public fascination with IQ is in the water. (Sometimes literally: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has opposed the fluoridation of tap water, claiming that it causes a decrease in IQ.) Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is seeking “super high-IQ” applicants. Vice President JD Vance has insulted the British former diplomat Rory Stewart on X, writing that “he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.” In February, a senior Trump administration official asked employees of the CHIPS Program Office to supply their SAT or IQ scores.
An interest in juicing IQ through training and supplements bridges the manosphere and the parenting internet. Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed “misogynist” and online masculinity idol who faces human-trafficking charges in Britain and Romania, claims an IQ over 140 and preaches on a podcast about how to “rewire your brain for relentless success.” Nucleus, a genetic testing start-up backed by the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, made a stir last year with a test that supposedly calculates an “intelligence score based on your DNA.” As the writer Max Read pointed out recently, some X users have begun asking, apparently earnestly, how “low IQ” people experience the world, as if they are fundamentally less human.
Such fixations are a long American tradition, and they are cresting again now at a key moment in history — at the consummation between Silicon Valley capitalism and right-wing political power.
A Human Ranking System
Intelligence testing would not arise until the 20th century, and the abbreviation “IQ” in 1922, but an early metric of intelligence was established by Francis Galton in his 1869 book, “Hereditary Genius.” Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was a leading proponent of social Darwinism, a pseudoscientific effort to organize human society around the promotion of the “survival of the fittest.”
Galton founded both the ideology of eugenics and the field of psychometrics — the application of objective measurement to the study of human psychology. In his book, he attempted a statistical analysis of human intelligence and argued that it was a heritable trait. He claimed that men who are “naturally capable” are nearly identical to those who “achieve eminence,” and charted dense genetic connections among various illustrious English judges, statesmen and artists. Nepotism was laundered into evidence of inherent superiority.
Then along came the IQ test, which formalized the scientific nature of the inquiry — or at least its scientific feeling. In 1905, the French psychologist Alfred Binet, with the psychiatrist Théodore Simon, developed the first intelligence scale in order to identify schoolchildren in need of remedial instruction. In 1916, the American eugenicist Lewis Terman adapted the test to create The Stanford-Binet scale, named after the university that employed him.
Terman’s initial tests, organized by age, were overt in their cultural biases: 7-year-olds were asked to describe an illustration of a crying Dutch girl in wooden shoes; 14-year-olds were asked to list three differences between a president and a king; adults were asked to interpret the implied lessons of fables. Though “IQ” suggests that human intelligence is a singular and fixed genetic quality, like height, what the test most reliably determines is how well a person performs on an intelligence test.
The results “have always produced a kind of photograph of the existing class structure, in which the better-off economic and ethnic groups are found to be more intelligent and the worse-off are found to be less so,” the journalist Nicholas Lemann writes. The current version of the test aims to measure fluid reasoning, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, working memory and accumulated knowledge — perhaps not coincidentally, the same forms of intelligence that are prized in the technology industry.
In his 2023 history “Palo Alto,” Malcolm Harris writes of Stanford as an institution built on eugenic thinking. Before Leland Stanford founded Stanford University, he established what he called the “Palo Alto System” to classify, train and breed superior racehorses at an intense pace of production — a system that sometimes resulted in the snapped tendons of weaker colts but had the benefit of weeding out inferior horses before investing too much in their development. Once Stanford applied this punishing system to human achievement, it seeded a century-long obsession with intelligence scoring in Silicon Valley — and in the America that it increasingly shaped.
The Binet-Simon test had an inclusive aim: Disabled children in France were at risk of being removed to asylums; by charting all students on the same intelligence scale, those children could instead be kept in schools and recommended for adaptive education.
But the Stanford-Binet scale was generalized into an intelligence test that could be used to measure and rank all humans, and assign them a score relative to a norm of 100. Soon Terman had enrolled his own son Frederick in a study of child “geniuses” and shopped his findings to the U.S. military.
It was America that pioneered the use of IQ for punitive ends, using low scores to deny certain immigrants entry to the country, to forcibly sterilize disabled people, and to push low-ranking soldiers into the line of fire while elevating high scorers to officer positions.
Though the crimes of Nazi Germany compromised the global popularity of eugenics, and encouraged the disavowal of the word, the British and American victories in the World War II also worked as an endorsement of the use of IQ testing in organizing war and, more generally, identifying elites.
In 1958, the British sociologist Michael Young used the term “meritocracy” to describe an emerging society organized around “merit” as the new justification for hierarchical power, which he defined as a combination of IQ scores and effort. His satirical work, “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” was written from the perspective of a future sociologist (also named Michael Young) who wished to preserve the meritocracy against its critics.
But the real Young was more skeptical. “If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become,” he wrote, “how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage.”
Young suggested that the meritocratic idea was tantalizing to parents who had been denied the pleasures of success, but could nevertheless invest in the possibility that their children, or their children’s children, might be judged smart and effortful enough to claim them. The more frustrated they were in their own life outcomes, the more maniacal they became about ensuring their children’s chances.
When Intelligence Is a Commodity
I see echoes of Young’s insights in the modern parenting internet, which is seized by its enthusiasm for supposedly brain-building supplements and granular child-development tips. As soon as I gave birth to my first child, I was inundated with parenting advice and Montessori-inspired toy brands on social media. They punctuated their sales pitches with little pink brain emojis, as if to suggest that their products could be infused into the organ itself.
The Baby Einstein videos of the 1990s, in which puppets and toys were set to classical music, look totally mindless in comparison. Conceivably any life activity — weaning, feeding, massage — can now be leveraged to optimize the toddler brain, assuring smart parents that, with enough effort, their children can be molded into little geniuses.
Young described midcentury parents who tried to prevent “downward mobility” by obsessing over amplifying their children’s IQs. It makes sense that millennials — an American generation for whom downward economic mobility is likely — would take to the project with a particular zeal.
As parents scramble to hoard the last scraps of meritocratic advantage, the very discourse around intelligence is adapting to the brute power plays of the Silicon Valley elite. The new, sneering invocation of IQ announces, perhaps, that the meritocracy has reached a breaking point. Earnest, nose-to-the-grindstone effort is out. So, too, is the IQ test. The number of an imagined IQ score refers back to nothing, but it’s a fitting signifier for the confluence of political and technological power — the place where political posturing meets capitalist production.
Trump echoed the Palo Alto System (and the eugenic programs it engendered) at a January victory rally, where he declared Musk’s 4-year-old son to be highly intelligent — not because he has any particular insight into early child development but because he knows who the child’s father is. “If you believe in the racehorse theory, he’s got a nice, smart son,” Trump said.
At the same time, the resurgence of the slur “retarded” serves as a blunt bookend to the obsession with genius. The term was once a medical diagnosis gleaned from intelligence scales before it transformed into a pejorative and finally became largely unacceptable in the aughts. But it can now be heard again in the speech of certain venture capitalists, political operatives, podcasters and comedians alike. In its current use, the slur mocks disabled people, marks political opponents as inherently inferior, and signals the rise of a new elite to whom the old rules of civility do not apply.
There is a feeling of totality to IQ, the number that determines all others. Its particular distillation of intelligence — a grab bag of processing, memory and literacy skills — has only become more salient as American capitalism has morphed into an information economy, where production increasingly centers on manipulating code and data instead of levers and plows.
It also flatters the tech oligarch, who now finds himself in a position of great political influence. He is not, however, content to simply claim the status of the wimpy nerd. A high IQ functions as a general-purpose human ranking system, one that implies invincibility, prosperity and virility. Figures like Musk, Thiel and Sam Altman have invested in biotechnology companies and longevity gambits that seek to convert knowledge into superhuman physical forms, turning smart men into strongmen and producing genetically optimized heirs.
It’s fitting that the product Silicon Valley now seeks to sell above all others is called artificial intelligence: a vision of intellect refined into a pure commodity, one that can be privatized and sold.
A.I.’s boosters are eager to announce the moment (one arriving imminently, we’re assured) when artificial intelligence will match or exceed human capacities. This whole elite intelligence-measuring contest sets the stage for the “high IQ” tech leader to seize ownership over the concept of intelligence itself — and to ultimately bring all people under its control. As Musk recently posted on X, the platform that he owns: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.”
Amanda Hess is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times, covering the intersection of internet and pop culture. More about Amanda Hess
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