Thread by @SethAbramson

As an Elon Musk biographer, I would peg his IQ as between 100 and 110. There’s zero evidence in his biography of anything higher.

And I want to repeat that now, lest you think it a typo.

There’s zero evidence, from his life history, of Musk having anything higher than a 110 IQ.

Stepped away from Twitter for a number of hours—on the basis of this not being a platform worth spending time on—and came back to find this tweet went viral because Nate Silver thinks Carlyle's 1800s theory of history, the Great Man Theory, is still relevant to historians in 2025

I understand the MAGAsphere runs on dudes who stayed at a Holiday Inn last night and are now expert astrophysicists, but another possibility is Musk's biographers know him better than fanboys do, and historians know more than pollsters about history.

🔗: sethabramson.substack.com/p/proof-of-des…

I want to make sure everyone understands that the MAGAs and Musk fanboys/fangirls in the comments are saying that the man who gave the interview below, who can barely get a sentence out and is largely incoherent, has an IQ north of 135.

You are in a cult.

The other thing this thread reveals is how many of the people who worship him know almost nothing about Elon Musk.

It's almost like Musk biographers exist for this very purpose—and like the fanboys and fangirls of Musk instead impart to *Musk* the contributions of his companies.

Einstein was not a genius because he had sufficient money to purchase companies and then consistently risked running them into the ground until the smart people at them figured out how to keep him out of the way. Ditto Newton. Musk has zero *personal* intellectual achievements.

I admit to using the preposterous measure of IQ to make a point I could as easily and accurately but less compellingly have made without IQ. My point—anyone reading my post in good faith understands—is what I just said: there's no evidence of intellectual achievement *by Musk*.

He was sued for stealing the idea for Zip2—which fired him as soon as investors got involved. He was going to run PayPal into the ground after his company merged with it—again he was fired. He invested in Tesla when it was distressed and quickly began running it into the ground.

By the late 2000s, Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy due to Musk. But fortunately he had founded his first and only truly successful and novel company in the 2000s, SpaceX—he did not found Tesla and his prior companies were not novel—and successfully lobbied President Obama...

...backchannel to kneecap NASA so SpaceX could thrive. The Russians had laughed Musk out of Moscow over SpaceX; it was only the coincidence of Obama being oddly committed to private spaceflight that kept SpaceX afloat, which is why Musk pretended to be a Democrat for a few years.

I account Elon Musk's idea for SpaceX to be more or less the only clearly good idea he has ever publicly had, though it required heavy lifting mostly from a powerful Black man for it to become a success, which may be why Musk has so much resentment for the former president now.

Of course I'm only referring to the idea for the company. Once it was founded, many reviews of its internal workings have indicated Mr. Musk was—as at the other companies he's been at—more of a threat to its success than an aid. It was smart folks at SpaceX who made it a success.

I needn't tell you the Boring Company is a failure that has done no more than produce an illegal flamethrower for fun, one that cannot be legally shipped and has caused lots of people legal issues.

Neuralink is mired in ethics investigations, and Musk does none of its science.

Everything Musk said about his intentions with Twitter was a lie, and business schools will teach how he ran this platform into the ground for 200 years.

xAI is a latecomer to the industry fueled not by good ideas but Musk money; its existence violates everything Musk said...

...about artificial intelligence being a civilizational risk and existential threat to the species. It turns out he was just angry that OpenAI became successful the moment he was not involved with it (once it didn't need his money).

So now he's created a crappy copycat company.

I will be generous and call Optimus merely a hoax.

Feel free to Google all the things Musk did to scam people into thinking he'd made a successful foray into robotics.

It does not take intelligence to throw money around and buy a company or buy a politician. Anyone would/could.

It does not take intelligence to, having thrown money at a politician, use the clout you accrued from that to advantage your own businesses—businesses you are well aware you have nothing to do with the success of, which is why you mess around with their patents to hide that fact.

It does not take intelligence to see that you need to use the money you made at SpaceX to keep Tesla afloat artificially, nor does it take intelligence to have been fired from two successive companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but made so much money from the firings...

...that you had the money to buy into Tesla and finance the dodgy early moves of SpaceX in the first place. But the most important thing I want to say is that Elongelicalism is a cult: because I'm not in the cult, many reading this are earnestly unable to process what I'm saying.

If you assign intelligence to just spending money, you're in a cult. If you attach intelligence to simply owning a successful company whose work on a day-to-day basis you have nothing to do with and who you are considerably more of a hindrance to than a help to, you're in a cult.

This particular sort of cult, which is a cult of corporatism rather than just a cult of personality, could not have existed at the time of Newton or even—I would argue—Einstein because at that point corporate worship was insufficient to get cultists to confuse companies and men.

It is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them. In most of the world the conversation we are having would seem utterly preposterous, as again there is no evidence of Musk having *intellectual* achievements.

What I have done for well over two years as a Musk biographer who has written three volumes' worth of Musk biographies is look exclusively at what former (but not fired for cause) employees not financially dependent on Musk have said about him rather than what he says of himself.

What they've said is no surprise if you consider Musk was fired from his first two companies and only missed running Tesla into the ground because of SpaceX money—he doesn't know how to run businesses. He knows how to make false promises and hype himself. He has few other skills.

He is only an average coder. He is only an average video game player. As a business manager he is atrocious, relying on luck and the willingness of workers to abuse themselves, on the back end using his money to avoid the legal complications of trying to run a business this way.

You can research for yourself how Musk uses patent practice to hide the fact that he's not the mind behind anything his companies have produced.

He thrusts into the shadows the actually intelligent people who work for him.

His job is to make false promises and be a hype man.

And it's not just his early failures that confirm he can't run a business. The Boring Company has failed. Optimus failed. Twitter has failed—he's already now begging for more money for it, though at this point anything given to him is essentially a bribe of a government official.

The reason no Elongelical reading this thread can accept a single word of it is that you, yes *you*, are actually the reason this intellectually unexceptional man managed to fail upward for decades. It was his ability to con you into wanting or needing him to be seen as a genius.

So in the same sense those who have entwined their identity with Trump despite the fact that he doesn't care if anyone else lives or dies will never accept that they have been conned—because it would speak volumes about *them*—the Musk mythos must be maintained...for *your* sake.

I have nothing invested in Musk being successful or not successful, genius or not, in lying about his history the way his fans do, so when I point people to the Elon Musk section of my publication—full of free articles about him—it's because I'm interested in the truth, instead.

I don't find IQ to be a valuable measure. I introduced the term to this conversation because it's used by *you fans* as some sort of supposed proof of Musk's intelligence—though none of you have any proof whatsoever of any IQ test the man's ever taken.

So let us be more blunt:

1. He is one of the most inarticulate figures in the U.S. today.
2. When challenged, he responds immediately with emotion and slurs rather than intelligent rejoinders.
3. He is provably media illiterate.
4. He is provably information illiterate.
5. He openly opposes higher ed.

6. He flamed out at University of Pretoria.
7. He flamed out at Queen's in Canada.
8. He flamed out at Penn.
9. He was not admitted to Stanford.
10. He was given what was arguably a charity degree at Penn years later in recognition of his financial successes and prior coursework.

11. He was a poor student in high school except 1-2 areas.
12. He admits he largely skipped classes at the three colleges he attended.
13. He admits he went to college to meet girls and did not care about his coursework.
14. He avoided fields in which critical thinking is taught.

15. He has contempt for the liberal arts and most social sciences, a contempt that hampers his ability to think critically through any of the issues that have dogged his life personally and professionally. This lacuna is obvious to anyone with a background in any of those fields.

16. His management style reveals someone who does not know how to collaborate, or dialogue, or brainstorm, or review relevant precedents, or consider multiple frames at once (scientific, legal, policy, budgetary, HR, cultural).
17. He has no moral or ethical code whatsoever.

18. He exhibits extremely primitive moral reasoning and no comprehension of ethics.
19. He's a poster-child of the Dunning-Kruger Effect—in that he doesn't know what he doesn't know, and cannot accept that he doesn't know things, and therefore thinks he's an expert in everything.

20. That he often introduces lies after the fact to cover for the reality that he didn't plan for foreseeable eventualities on the front end suggests poor strategic thinking.
21. His common sense is awful—as when he couldn't deduce why there are more SSNs than living Americans.

22. There is no evidence from his relationships of the man having any emotional intelligence.
23. There is no evidence of him having charisma in one-on-one interactions, though it is true that before large crowds people mistake his neurospicy enthusiasm for a compelling persona.

I could go on. I could continue this list until I got to 100. And each item would be confirmed by historical research published in the aforementioned section of my publication.

Everything from Musk twice raising his family's emerald mines to media when he didn't have to do so...

...only to later realize what a disaster that decision was and pretend that *someone else besides him* had introduced the Zambian mines that funded his early life into public discourse, to thinking that he had the ability to design a vehicle himself (the embarrassing Cybertruck).

I've nothing invested in worshiping rich folks or presuming they're smart. That's a core feature of Republicanism in this era, and therefore many readers of this thread need it to be true—need it with a longing they may not even understand—that Trump and Musk are intelligent men.

It's not the job of historians, journalists, biographers, lawyers, editors, attorneys, artists or academics—all things I am—to coddle your hangups by pretending things are true you emotionally need to be so.

Your hangups are your business; deal with them. sethabramson.net/bio

(PS) Obviously the reason I've written the equivalent of 3 Musk books is because a Twitter thread is insufficient to say everything that must be said. I didn't note how his drug use is affecting him, or depression, or the crippling stress he admits to. All can affect performance.

(PS2) My second full-length book on Musk comes out this year. It's an adaptation of dozens of biographical essays I've written on the man. You can see the link to my bio above for more information on my bona fides as a Musk biographer. I will never apologize for publishing facts.