What Is Elon Musk’s I.Q.?

Who seems more knowledgeable about cognitive science: Amanda Hess or Steven Pinker?

From the New York Times:

Critic’s Notebook

What Is Elon Musk’s I.Q.?

It’s of course an interesting question because Musk’s business accomplishments as an industrialist are so astonishing (running two radically different hardware companies in electric vehicles and rockets, plus SpaceX’s subsidiary Starlink, which is doing very well). I can recall driving around Beverly Hills in 2013 and seeing three Teslas. “Wow,” I said to myself, “Teslas are becoming as common in Beverly Hills as Lamborghinis. That’s amazing. I never thought they’d outsell McLarens. At this rate, someday Teslas might become as common as Ferraris!”

On the other hand, Musk’s not infallible as a tweeter and sometimes falls for obviously wrong ideas.

The questionable measure of intelligence has now been uncoupled from any test and loosed into the discourse to justify Silicon Valley’s power.

By Amanda Hess

Amanda Hess is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times, covering the intersection of internet and pop culture.

April 5, 2025

Harvard cognitive science superstar Steven Pinker is not impressed with Ms. Hess’s essay:

It’s the usual Amanda Hess kind of thing:

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 I.Q. individual.” Musk’s onetime biographer Seth Abramson wrote on X that he would “peg his I.Q. 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 I.Q. at more than 130, a number gleaned from his reported SAT score.

I’ll tell you Musk’s SAT score below the paywall.

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 I.Q.s serve as a force multiplier for both positive and negative traits.”

When we speculate about Musk’s I.Q., 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.

Musk’s results are public on the pre-1995 SAT, which was one of the best cognitive tests ever.

Lots of Ivy League grads want to tell you that they got into the Ivy League but not tell you that they got in on what is basically an IQ test.

… For more than a century, psychologists have debated the extent to which an I.Q. test is capable of measuring a person’s inherent intellect (and if such a thing even exists).

Actually, the scientific debate was over a long time ago, as Steven Pinker pointed out a decade ago:

Now, “I.Q.” 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.

Eh, the terms I.Q. and IQ have been used fairly steadily in American books for much of the last century according to Google’s Ngram:

Paywall here. Lots below it.