Thread by @SethAbramson

I only went to Harvard Law and have three terminal graduate degrees, including a PhD, so I apologize if this is a question a drooling moron would ask, @yhbryankimiq, but is there a reason you do not list his accomplishments?

Is it because none are his—but those of his employees?

https://twitter.com/yhbryankimiq/status/1894040848473428118

I know this is a difficult concept for Elongelicals, so let me use their favorite form of argument: anecdote.

I have 5 higher-ed degrees; I earned them all personally and in the shortest possible period of time.

Elon flamed out at three colleges and was *not* admitted to a PhD.

I’ve founded 4 startups: a consulting company and three media outlets, one a multimillion-dollar operation. I had no seed money for my startups but the little in my bank account.

Musk had money from his dad’s emerald mines and $300 million via Zip2—the idea for which wasn’t his.

I’ve published 20 books and released 25 albums. My creativity and my words are what’s behind all of them. Like anyone I employ tools, but the creativity is mine.

Musk owns companies whose work is done by people other than him. He’s not Einstein or Newton—not a thinker—but a CEO.

Mr. Musk is given credit for being a good hype man, and that is fair. But every time he hyped something he used a brand he had purchased to get the earned media for that hype, meaning he was not starting from nothing.

The sole exception was his first gig—the aforementioned Zip2.

Not only was Musk sued multiple times over allegations he stole the idea for Zip2 (allegations the Isaacson biography implicitly confirms in my reading); not only was he illegally working in the U.S. as what he’d call a “criminal alien” at the time; not only were he and Kimbal...

...so unprofessional as they tried to build Zip2 using an idea they got from a phonebook salesman that they had *open brawls requiring hospitalization* in the middle of their office in front of employees; not only was *all the code Musk wrote* later redone by someone competent...

...but when he briefly became CEO he quickly got fired for incompetence.

He was given $300 million to *go away*.

He then used that wealth to position himself such that anything he hyped in the future was *already a high-publicity asset*.

He can’t build his publicity from zero.

By comparison, who am I? A retired poet/professor who lives in far-off northern New England and was making $17K/year as late as 2015, and far less than the US median income as late as 2020. I’ve built—from nothing—a following of millions by writing words seen by tens of millions.

My late dad was a product manager at a company that went belly-up in the early 1990s; after that he was a consultant and substitute teacher. My mom was an art teacher. I didn’t come from any money. The Musk Family is among the richest in its nation—and Musk made use of that cash.

Elon had so much money—even before he fled South Africa for Canada as a draft dodger—that he could afford to choose the second of three colleges he flamed out from on the basis of how cute he thought its girls were.

I just finally paid off my student loans *in my mid-forties*.

My point is that I built what I have with my own ideas and my own money.

Musk made money with the ideas of others and the money of others, and then paid others to hire others to do work Musk was not capable of doing that he would then take credit for.

See the difference there?

But it’s more than that. As I’ve written about elsewhere, since I was a kid I’ve had nonclinical agoraphobia. I so intensely dislike socializing or collaborating I have to do everything myself; I don’t ask for help. But I pushed through that to become a successful trial attorney.

Elon Musk is the opposite.

Since last century—literally for many decades, now—he has had the money to pay others to do *for* him. Who hires his amazing employees? Someone else. Who manages them? Someone else. Who collaborates with them? Someone else. And you know what? It shows.

It’s not just him being fired from Zip2 and PayPal for incompetence. It’s not just him nearly driving Tesla to bankruptcy in the 2000s, and now running it into the ground in the 2020s. It’s not just the Boring Company and Optimus being failures or xAI a mere copycat of OpenAI.

It's not just Neuralink being under federal investigation, or SpaceX being under federal investigation, or Tesla being under federal investigation. It’s not just the very existence of xAI betraying what Musk fans wanted to believe was a coherent philosophy he had on AI’s dangers.

It’s not just that Musk has virtually no patents—and has worked to suppress the patents his employees would’ve had because they’d reveal they’re the brains behind *all* his operations. Hell, it’s not even the fact that for the patents he’s named on, many others are too (telling).

I said I was going to focus on anecdotes, but I’ll now move to expert opinion. I was a Comms professor for years and taught media and information literacy. I’m telling you, as an expert, that Musk is both media illiterate and information illiterate—and no smart person is in 2025.

I’ve also been a boss. At a consulting company; as an attorney managing clients and professional investigators; as a professor within an academic hierarchy with thousands of students.

No very smart person manages people as Musk does. I wouldn’t call him a manager—he’s an abuser.

Mr. Musk has turned temper tantrums, rants, outrageous man-child demands and contempt for the law into one of the most *litigated-against and federal law-violative* business empires in world history. And it has made him so much money! On paper. But little enough liquidity that...

...he had to *beg* for help in buying Twitter from America’s enemies. And now he’s begging for money for Twitter again. And the banks have sold off his Twitter debt as bad debt. And why not? Twitter’s financials under Musk are an absolute disaster; he uses shell games to hide it.

SO WHAT “REAL-LIFE ACCOMPLISHMENTS” ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Do you think it takes over a 110 IQ—above-average intelligence—to use someone else’s idea to poorly code (while in America illegally) a silly dot-com-bubble idea that sold for a lot at a time *anything* dot-com-related was wildly overvalued? Or use the cash to hire real geniuses?

The man isn’t an engineer. He has an undergraduate Economics degree he was given years after leaving a school he transferred to, and he got that charity degree after he had hit it big and his investors saw that he needed a degree to stay in the country.

Nor is he a physicist.

He got an *undergrad* Physics degree along with his charity Econ degree.

And then he lied about matriculating at a Stanford PhD, which couldn’t possibly have accepted him (and didn’t!) because *he had no undergrad degree at all* at the time.

He lied to hide his illegal status.

The Stanford lie was useful at the time—essential, in fact. But now it’s an albatross around his neck because it’s so obviously false (Stanford would have evidence of his admission to a program and doesn’t). But it’s since become part of his supposed gravitas as an intellectual.

If @yhbryankimiq is an actual genius as he says he is—and who knows, he may be—he knows that you do not lecture someone who knows more than you on a topic. I am an Elon Musk biographer and I know more about the man than any mere Elongelical, no matter how smart, thinks they know.

@yhbryankimiq And if @yhbryankimiq is a genius as he says he is, he knows that he must go one-on-one with me in this thread outlining the “real-life achievements” Musk has that are attributable to *his intellect* and not his money, his access, his employees, the station of his birth, or luck.

@yhbryankimiq What @yhbryankimiq can’t use as a crutch here is the bias of U.S. culture for *presuming* the rich are smart. Wealthy people may on average exhibit forms of intelligence at a higher rate than others, but that has nothing to do with Musk’s specific case. He has his own life story.

@yhbryankimiq IQ is a bullshit, stupid measure I use to speak to Elongelicals in a language they understand.

My point is that there’s no evidence in Musk’s history of him having an exceptional intellect.

Drive? Gumption? Resilience? Brazenness? Self-delusion? Sure. Not exceptional intellect.

@yhbryankimiq My IQ, such as it matters at all—it doesn’t—tests at 135 to 140, which is far lower than Elongelicals peg Musk’s at. But no one with my background and experience and training (as described above) hears out of Musk’s mouth, or sees in his biography, any significant evidence of...

@yhbryankimiq ...language or self-expressive capabilities, EQ, high-level reasoning, wisdom, multimodal literacies, a complex ethical code, significal moral development on the Kohlberg Scale, interpersonal skills or a well-developed psyche. No—we see a mess of a man. Who’s also deeply unhappy.

@yhbryankimiq His relationships are a disaster. His companies—except SpaceX, whose employees say only runs well when he stays away from it—are a disaster. Twitter is a disaster. His DOGE hoax is a disaster. Everything he touches turns to ruin.

He is largely supported by a cult of personality.

Then there are those who support him—praise him—for monetary reasons: because they make money off his companies. Will you disclose, @yhbryankimiq, the full list of any investments you have that would be affected by Musk failing or succeeding in any of his current public projects?

@yhbryankimiq I’ve no financial ties with Elon Musk. I give him no money (he gave me my blue tick for free) and I get no money from him. I’m not invested in anything he’s involved with. I’m simply a Musk biographer who—like any good historian this century—knows to be objective but not neutral.

@yhbryankimiq There’s no doubt Musk is rich.

There’s no doubt his companies have achieved a lot.

There’s no doubt that he’s audacious and thinks big.

None of that has anything to do with intelligence. Many con men are rich, in certain limited respects successful, and are known for audacity.

About the Author: sethabramson.net/bio