Article author: Noah SmithArticle compiler: Block unicorn

I am writing a longer article, But it has taken two days to complete. During this period, I would like to share a rather ridiculous remark I have seen recently: "Elon Musk is not smart. His IQ may be around 100, or even lower. The reason why he can achieve what he is today is completely It's because he was born in a wealthy family and had great luck. ”

Of course , this statement is wrong. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk scored 1,400 points when he took the SAT for the second time in the late 1980s. The SAT score is highly correlated with IQ. According to all the information I found, the 1400 points at that time corresponds to an IQ of more than 130 points. Additionally, Musk holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and was admitted to the PhD program in Materials Science in the 1990s. His intelligence level is much higher than that of ordinary people.

However, the absurdity of Abramson's remarks lies not in its content, but in its purpose-he attempted to demean Elon Mar Ske's IQ is used to alleviate American society's fear of Musk and his role in the United States. This is a very stupid approach. First of all, IQ is not an effective measure of Musk's ability to do field, such as organizing and improving businesses, identifying talents, managing large numbers of people, raising funds, and creating And convey future vision, etc. Keuschnigg et al. (Smoothing in cognitive abilities of high-income earners, 2023) found that after wealth reaches a higher level, the effect of IQ will flatten:

"We analyzed the registration data in Sweden, which contained cognitive abilities and labor market performance of 59,000 men who participated in the compulsory military service test. Surprisingly, we found that although competence and wages were between The overall relationship is strong, but after an annual income of more than €60,000, the role of ability flattens out, only one standard deviation above the average. The highest income 1% of the population has even slightly lower cognitive abilities than the income Their crowd. ”

In the past, Americans attached great importance to abilities that could not be measured by exams—realistic business acumen is often more respected than book knowledge. But with the importance of the knowledge industryAs the power and status of the highly educated professional class increased, American society began to worship pure intelligence. Even Americans who insist that IQ is racist and meaningless when asked will be considered racist and meaningless in social media arguments, call others “idiots” or talk about their low IQ without thinking.

However, regardless of Musk's IQ, he undoubtedly accomplished an incredible feat of organizational construction in his career. Here is a passage from a post I wrote about Musk last October in which I described entrepreneurship as a superpower:

"Although the American manufacturing industry (and manufacturing industries in Germany, Japan and other countries) have become hollowed out due to competition and our great established enterprises are also staggering and declining, an entrepreneur is able to establish and expand in the United States in a huge way , cutting-edge high-tech manufacturing companies, which are leading the way around the world. This person is Elon Musk. ”

SpaceX As an example. Without this Musk's company, the United States would be far behind in the space race. But with SpaceX, the United States is far ahead…and SpaceX is a manufacturing giant. Although almost all manufacturing is in the United States, the company is able to surpass the entire manufacturing industry in its own field... SpaceX has sent so many Starlink communication satellites into low-Earth orbit that Musk's satellite constellations have exceeded The sum of all other active satellites and spacecraft...

It is not that no other entrepreneurs have tried to enter the space field. Jeff Bezos, founder of the world's top e-commerce websites and cloud computing networks, founded Blue Origin, a company that competes with SpaceX, but it lags far behind...

But SpaceX is neither a fluke nor an exception. Despite recent increased competition, Tesla still completely dominates the U.S. electric car market…and when Musk recently built a cluster of GPUs to train his new AI model, it was far faster than Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun believes that the scope is possible.

As an industrialist, Musk is unmatched in American history—the closest to his rival Henry Ford in the aerospace industry It also failed.

Ses Abramson cannot establishAnything that SpaceX, Tesla or Musk builds, no matter how much money others give him. Dear readers, I can't do it, nor can you. I don't think Tao Zhexuan or other super genius mathematicians with the highest IQ on Earth can do it either. Any of us, even if we spend a lifetime burning a trillion dollars, may not be able to create anything close to Musk's high-tech industrial giant.

Why do we fail? Even without any institutional barriers, we cannot identify the best managers and engineers. Even if we find them, we often can’t convince them to work for us—even if they come, we may not be motivating them to work with all their might every week. We also often fail to promote the best employees, give them more power and responsibility, or decisively fire people who perform poorly. We cannot raise tens of billions of dollars at favorable rates to fund companies. We cannot negotiate contracts and create heat for consumer goods. And so on.

In addition, Musk may have done many less obvious things that we cannot do:

Marc Andreessen said that a key driver of Musk's success is his persistence in solving problems quickly, and he usually works directly with engineers or programmers who are in trouble... This legendary risk Investors share his insights with Musk in working closely with X, xAI and SpaceX… Unlike many CEOs, Musk is committed to understanding every detail of his business, said A16Z’s co-founder and general partner. He “goes deep into the front line, talks directly to people who do specific work” and acts as “the chief problem solver in the organization.”

For more than a decade, I have been watching how Musk successfully builds seemingly impossible companies and pushes them to new heights of success. And every time, there are ridicules on social media calling him an idiot, fraudster and gangster, claiming that his company is about to collapse and go bankrupt. Even though Musk failed to fulfill every promise he had made, he kept those who laughed at it again and again. Moreover, Musk achieved these achievements when the entire American proceduralism and anti-development system opposed what he did. As we all know, it is very difficult to build a factory in the United States, and the reasons include land acquisition costs, procedural obstacles such as NEPA, regulations, high labor costs, etc. However, as of 2023, Tesla has produced more cars in the United States than in :

California is one of the most difficult states to build a factory, but SpaceX has made most of the rockets in the state—these Rockets are much better than anything they make—almost single-handedly reviving the aerospace industry in the Los Angeles area. And when Musk wants to build a data center for his new AI company, xAI—the process usually takes several years. Time – but it was reported that he completed it in just 19 days.

In contrast to Nate Silver's view, these Achievement has little to do with Elon's IQ.

Some progressives still insist on ridicule Musk's intelligence, partly because of the traditional class resentment of the educated elite against the industrial giants. But I think more of the reason is just what young people call "coping mechanisms" (cope). Currently, Musk is using all his talents to build a company—incentive employees, circumvent red tape, identify and break through every bottleneck at a very fast pace—in order to reshape the U.S. civil service through DOGE . Telling yourself that Musk actually has no talent, or that he is just lucky, or that he is just a liar, or that he succeeds only because of help, these are ways for progressives to comfort themselves, and they believe in Musk's efforts It is destined to fail.

Another way some people deal with Musk's "blitz" is to stubbornly believe that history is not driven by "great men" but by slow and unstoppable forces:

Of course, history is extremely complex and only happens once, so historians cannot really know how much history is. How much of the "great men" are driven by slow and unstoppable forces. When asked, they acknowledge this:

Note the key examples of Genghis Khan. Of course, it was not just his decision that affected the course of history; many other grassland warlords also tried to conquer the world, but failed. Genghis Khan may have benefited from appearing at the right time at the right time location, but he may have the talent to organize and motivate, which makes him the only person in history who can conquer so many territories.

Of course, MaasKe himself has not ignored this comparison:

You can't help laughing at Musk Before misspelling "Khan", remember that Genghis Khan himself could not spell his name, either because he had never learned to read and write - again, a vivid reminder that book knowledge and organizational talent are two very different things. Those who comfort themselves that Musk can never conquer them because he does not have the world's highest IQ progressives, just as stupid as 13th-century scholars told themselves that his would never be conquered by an illiterate ponies.

However, besides these "coping mechanisms" and class bias, I think there are another progressives who try to call Musk a "fool." reason. Over the past 15 years, mass social media has replaced the external reality in many people’s lives so much that what happens on Twitter/X feels more real than what happens on the street. In this virtual world full of condemnation and insults, the only way to attack and defeat someone is to constantly call them "stupid" and have many others call them "stupid" at the same time. The idea is that if enough people call someone "stupid" at the same time, then he is defeated and you win. That's why everyone on Twitter/X is always calling someone an idiot, a fool or something like that.

However, in the real world outside of that tiny X app on your phone, simply calling someone "stupid" doesn't really beat them , just like Rachel Maddow said bad things about Trump on MSNBC, it didn’t actually “destroy Trump.” Perhaps saying Musk has an IQ of only 110 will make you feel like you have defeated him in his little fantasy world, but in the real world, he is still destroying your institutions at an amazing speed.

Those who think that devalue Musk's ability will somehow defeat him or make him disappear are nothing but simple fools - not low IQ, It is an unwise person who responds to external challenges suboptimal. In many important ways, Elon Musk is the most capable person in the United States, and we deny this fact that it will only make a living.