Author of Upcoming Elon Musk Biography Says ‘There Is No Evidence’ Billionaire Has Any ‘Intellectual Achievements’

Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess

I guarantee his IQ is made up too. Not that an IQ test actually means shit.

IQ tests are combo test of how white and how autistic are you. All tests are biased, and what do you bet when he got his super special smart boy IQ label he was in South Africa and the test administrator was another white dude.
- Wouldn't surprise me if the person administering the test was also paid under the table by Musk Snr to make sure Elon's result looked better than it actually was.
IQ tests are not an objective measurement of intelligence! It kinda measures pattern recognition and some other skill! Its a scam to sell preparatory classes for itself!
40-50-ish years ago they quite popular! You were required to take one for uni admissions, for appliying to work… Well before we found out its bs!
- It's a relative measure of performance for narrow and specific set of tasks. It's not BS, that's like saying the 100m dash is BS. It's just that people have wildly overstated the general implications of the measure.
- I don't know if it's fully BS. It's just another data point to add for the ahhkkksshhualllyy crowd imo. But pattern recognition I think has high importance in actual intelligence.
- I agree. Its also super biased. I wouldn't be surprised if it correlated with financial success in certain demographics in certain locations/communities, but like you say, it's not an objective measure of intelligence.
- We had to take a mandatory IQ test at the beginning of military service, my score was in the highest percentile and because of this I ended up in officer training. It wasn't the Mensa type test, they measured our language, math and pattern recognition skills with a vast battery of questions with a time limit.
  Many friends of mine got average IQ scores in the army test but they are the ones who are really smart and extremely succesful.
  In university I got a chance to take the Mensa type test and got ~140 points. I just laughed it off since at the same time I was struggling to pass my courses, while my friends who got average scores passed them with ease.
  I do not consider myself really "smart" in any way, I just have a very good memory and I'm pretty adept at solving problems. Otherwise I'm just about as average a guy can be.
- Full-scale cognitive batteries (sophisticated IQ tests) are great... for diagnostics. If someone has difficulties identifying the domains where the need extra help, accommodations. I order them all the time and they guide me on how to manage patients. The most telling thing about IQs is that I've never seen it in on a resume, not even mensa memberships.
- So, you know how there’s a button on the top-left of your keyboard for ending sentences? Believe it or not, there’s also one on the bottom right as well! It looks like this: .
What you want to bet he had someone else take the test for him lol? Judging by how he plays games and all, it seems to be his m.o….
he abandonded his schooling once he got his visa, and did some shady sht to get his BROTHER one too. hes more or less just a richer version of trump, just slightly"smarter".

I don't remember the quote exactly but.

"It's just so dumb" "So dumb it's genius" "No it's just dumb"

perfectly encapsulates musk.

From glass onion lol. Great movie, btw.
- Janelle Monae crushes it in her role. I mean absolutely crushes it. In it she is acting in the role of a character acting in a role, which is actually really hard to do in a really satisfying way, and she absolutely pulls it off. What's more is that she lets the veil slip just enough, as an actress, for the character playing the role to be believable as an actress. Like her music and visual artistry as an R&B performer is incredible, but there's still a part of me that feels like the world lost something from her not going into acting. But if she had, she'd probably have put out an album that would make me lament she hadn't focused on R&B.
- It's in that movie but it's not from it. Did you seriously think it had never been said before that? It's been used for centuries in different forms, even exactly as said in glass onion.
  Same with "it's so bad it's good" both with and without "nah, it's just bad" after. I think one of the most well known things like that is "The Room", and many reference that movie when something else fits the description but it's not at all from that movie, it existed long before it.
- Nah, I thought that quote from the film summarized it quite well…
Miles Bron --> Mr Elon is B?
- Yes, he was intended to be a fictional stand-in for the muskrat.

This is such a burn! "Abramson noted, “It is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them."

For many evangelicals, they also associate wealth with divine blessing.
- Also any sort of success.
  If you’re chronically ill or have family problems or are poor, you must have done something to deserve it, because god will reward the worthy. Makes it really easy to be bigoted.
Those are probably corollaries to Worthington's Law. "He makes more money than you do!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbU4VRs2rro
Presumably his companies must just run themselves, because we seem to be expected to believe that he's running a rocket ship company, an electric car company, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, moon-lighting as the de facto President of the United States, while also dicking around on Twitter all day long and being one of the world's #1 gamers and parenting like 15 children or whatever it's supposed to be now. (Or at least, the ones that are still talking to him I guess.)

I feel like Musk was a symptom of Americans really wanting a genius billionaire to be a real thing as it reinforces this American dream everyone's dreaming about.

Reading the CPAC transcript clearly shows that he's currently below average intelligence if anything.

Well yeah, that's the American Dream right? That if you're smart and work hard, you'll be rich?
- Yeah and you need to be asleep to believe it
- And like most dreams, it just won't happen in real life.
My feelings are that Steve Jobs was the quintessential cultural personality CEO and his early death sent a lot of people desperately looking for the next one, who ended up being Elon.
The difference was that Jobs actually had taste and a good vision for the future. He could build a smart team and let them drive progress then motivate to go further without making things up like Elon. So the media papered over Elon's wild confabulation, instead of showing him in a true light.
- Most of that's false though. He couldn't build a good smart team, Wozniak could. He was very good at screwing others out of ownership in the company they helped build though. He was also very good at one thing, envisioning a computer in every home, and a computer in every pocket. That was his one true talent.
  But he was not "smart". He died to cancer detected early enough to heal with modern medicine, but chose quack treatments instead. There really isn't any such thing as general intelligence. Everyone's got very specialized knowledge in some topic, and are idiots in everything else.
- Time has been kind to Mr. Jobs. Read about his early years at Apple... he was famous for skewering anyone that disagreed with him. He also had lovely habits like parking his sports car in handicapped spots so he didn't have to walk as far. You can't disagree with his talent for running a company that did an awful lot of innovation, but he wasn't a nice guy. He named one of his first products, the Lisa after his daughter, but didn't treat the actual daughter that well.
- steve didnt take SHOWERS. he stunk up the office and his employees had to beg him to clean himself before meetings with potential investors and customers
They wanted Iron Man and got Justin Fuckin Hammer.
- Phoney Starck
You can have a high IQ and still be an utterly inept moron. I have family in Mensa and they are hands down some of the laziest, stupidest people I know.
- Mensa is utterly meaningless and so is any IQ test. We hardly understand how brain works and some think we can evaluate it through some online test and assign a number to it?
  Ridiculous and anyone who'd fall for that should buy a bridge from me I have in Brooklyn to become a billionaire by collecting road tax fee, ayy great deal only mensa geniuses would recognize 😆

And the Understatement of the Year award goes to…

Seriously, when I first heard of this guy, I thought he must be smart. Then he started talking about things in my career field, and thought wow, that’s a stupid thing to say. The more he talked, the more I realised he’s a moron about nearly everything. Now I’m not convinced he can actually get dressed unassisted.

He definitely dresses himself !
- I believe he chooses his own clothes, just not that he actually puts them on. It’s a bit amazing that he doesn’t wear the same Darth Vader costume every day like some toddlers insist upon doing.
  He seems like the sort of idiot who could strangle himself trying to figure out how a shirt works, is what I’m saying.
And yet executives in your career field probably would have nodded sagely, assuming that affinity to Musk would confer an appearance of intelligence to them, because they have no idea about the field either.
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
About the only consistent ability they have is to be complete sociopaths to screw over customers, employees, and shareholders alike. Which admittedly is a pretty powerful ability...
- After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
  It's the "Peter principle":
  The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
My thoughts exactly! After that it was like a domino effect... I realized that probably everything this guy ever said and done was pure BS. Fake it until you make it.
A few years ago I watched a clip of Musk giving a tour of a sort of museum SpaceX has that shows the evolution of their rockets. At one point he was talking about how the more recent rockets had fewer "fiddly bits" on the outside.

Didn't one of Trump's professors call him one of the dumbest students he ever had?

In that light, these two are perfect for each other.

I've met a couple people who've met Trump, and let's just say "He's the dumbest person I've ever met" is the default opinion of him.

Not trying to be an ass, but do you have a link to that tweet?
- Not op, but here you go: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
- The ass is the one who posts screenshots of a website without linking to it. Especially if its a screenshot of text
It's giving Oblivion NPC lmao
- "PAY THE COURT A FINE OR SERVE YOUR SENTENCE"
I know you have but what did I do?

Elonis a highly productive con man. He fooled me when I bought the FSD option on my Tesla in 2019 for $8k. When I sold it, the market only was willing to pay $1500.

Congrats on getting out of the abusive relationship, but may I ask why you believed him in 2019 when it was clear he had been lying and promising FSD for nearly a decade at that point? Were you just not following the news all that closely and took his word at face value? Or was the promise, if it came true, just so tantalizing that you turned a blind eye to the turmoil surrounding Musk? Thanks in advance, I love learning about peoples’ thought processes after they have realized they made a mistake.
- Personally, I don't blame anyone being fooled. He has an army of social media cultists obfuscating reality for him without him even asking. It's hard to see the truth when it's drowned out by religious doctrine.

Man this book will probably be banned before it comes out

Camacho would be a much better president
- Camacho at least wabted to make things better and hire a smart person
They need some Friendship:

yes. and it doesn't matter. donald trump is a moron, but he's evil, and has failed upward to be president of the united states twice, first time a million americans died due to a purposefully inept covid response, this second time, he's going to beat that number by ordinates. everyone so fixated on how smart or accomplished these nazis are, it does not matter. This is a way for everyone to feel better that they're smarter, or know sooooo many people that are smarter. If we were smarter, they wouldn't keep fucking beating, and killing us. IQ means nothing, it's what you can leverage with what you have individually or within or at the forefront of a group that does. And these Nazi fucks know how to do that.

Yes, they have a particular narrow cleverness about how to abuse people and systems for their own gain. Since fascists only care about power, pointing out that they are dumb, hypocritical or inconsistent doesn't achieve anything. All they see is that you're keeping yourself busy talking while they load their guns and prepare the camps. The only way to fight fascism is to actually fight it.
If we were smarter, they wouldn’t keep fucking beating
Well, the problem is that there are a whole lot of stupid people that are easily convinced to vote for people like this, even if our side believes in putting smart, experienced, educated people into power.
So, even if we are smarter, we are outvoted by a lot of very stupid people (in some instances - in other instances, it's because of extreme gerrymandering and "gifts" like the Electoral College, so even if we get a majority of people to make the sane choice, we still end up losing ).
Lastly, the weasel apparatchiks on their side have found ways to peel off voters with things like Gaza and the fact that Democrats have not given them a pretty pony, too.

Leon came from Apartheid driven wealth, which paid for his education, and learned how to suck the US taxpayers dry while firing people left and right. Fuck him and DOGE. What about his brother Kimball who hides behind the curtains?

Imagine being as stupid as this clown is and his vice president and still... STILL somehow being smarter than the average voter. The bar is on the ground, folks.

If it makes it any better id argue that the average voter at least has the excuse of being propagandized and under educated with minimal ability to improve. These fucks have more than enough money to inprove themselves nearly infinitely but would rather wallow in their egos and call it wisdom.
I feel like if ya sat down with Cletus the Appalachian hillbilly and told him the tale of his names origin he would probably find it interesting at the very least.
- with minimal ability to improve.
  This is the part I’m still trying to wrap my head around. In the US, almost everyone with a pulse has internet access, and websites like Wikipedia are not blocked or filtered. Obviously you’re right because there are a lot of misinformed people, I just don’t understand how people let that happen to themselves.
The thing is they might be passable as random folks. The problem is their power and aspirations far exceed random folks, and so, compared to what you'd want to see in those positions, they are very dumb, but exude so much confidence that people have a tendency to assume that confidence must be somehow justified.
- I work a dangerous job. When I see super confident people I refuse to work with them (edit: I am super skeptical, there are folks who know what they are doing but I wouldn’t call that exuding confidence). I have learned over the years that confidence is fake as fuck, and usually correlates with incompetence and ignorance (when you don’t know what the heck you are doing you can be unaware of the risk involved)…
  There are people who know what they know and know what they don’t know, but it doesn’t come across in the same way as someone who exudes confidence.
  I despise confidence lol…

While I agree with the premise of the book, everyone who has met/worked with/knows Seth Abramson all day what a piece of shit grifter hack he is, so I don’t know how much confidence I have in the book overall.

I do not doubt that evidence to support this assertion exists, but Abramson is always chasing the next big thing and bitches about how no one likes him on bsky like an angsty teenager. He’s just cringe.

I was actually kinda interested in the upcoming book... Can anyone else confirm if his work is garbage? I'm not super familiar with him.
- https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/12/sharing-seth-abramson-not-once-not-ever.html
  https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-grifters-are-coming-laura-loomer-louise-mensch-sheriff-david-clarke-all-shopping-new-books/
Oh! Haha now I know who you are talking about. Yes he is very.... Intense on Bluesky. I must say I understand. Living in this world is like taking crazy pills and I can understand "just reciting reality out loud for as many people to see" as a coping mechanism.

Ahh, i loved reading this. like blam on a sunburn. cold water on a hot day.

I think i discovered i have a kink for people shit-talking about tech CEOs.

Blam!
- Blam-o!
- alright, one sec, registering BLAM! as skin lotion brand.

Did he even get a real degree?

I'm not convinced he even knows how to code, if we are being honest.

- Elon doesn't think the government uses SQL. He's dumb as fucking rocks.
- I know how to code and during my career, I've worked with people that could only barely do it, mostly relied on others to carry their weight, and often would fail upwards into management track stuff, usually done as a defensive strategy to get them away from doing damage hands-on. Of course, some of them effectively did MORE damage later by doing incredibly bone-headed things because some of them suffered from extreme arrogance and Dunning-Kruger.
  Watching fElon in his takeover of Twitter and turning it into xitter, I was not paying too close of attention, but the level of chaos and performative bullshit seemed to be terrible at both a management/ownership level and on a technical one.

like kim dotcom. same guy to me.

There's this website that listed bunch of stuff about Kim Dotcom and his ventures. (the list barely scratches the surface. But the important thing is that people thought he was hack decades ago.)
When I visited the site last time, I was like "ohhhhh, they've found a picture of Kim wearing an SS helmet. I really didn't know what else I was expecting."
- I'm surprised that the website doesn't list Felon Muskow as a charlatan.
Who?

I’m pretty sure there’s no evidence that the soup between his ears qualifies as a human brain, but yet- here we are, allowing him and his term of incel lackeys full and unfettered access to all of America’s finances.

I always knew America would somehow end embarrassingly. I just had no idea it would be this shameful.

That is because everything Elmo says and has said is a lie.

When is the biography coming out?

Also, when is that HBO documentary on fElon coming out?

What about his intellectual bankruptcy?

A failson that failed upwards

tell us something we don't know

I'd give the little shit 0 gold star stickers too.

A college degree just means you could afford the time and money to stick around until an institution gives it to you.
Unless you are a celebrity, then some glory seeking institution will just give you an "honorary" degree.
College can be an enriching experience, but the degree itself doesn't prove you actually availed yourself of that enrichment or proved your capabilities.
College degrees are a dime a dozen.
- I have two stem degrees and I am of average intelligence. At the very least, having a degree doesn't make you a "super genius" like the MAGAt cult believes

I mean, he is using his position to gain wealth and power. Im sure he didnt get there by being stupid. No, hes not some Tony Stark level engineer and his intellectual and engineering achievements are nothing of note. Hes really good at swindling people and getting a large proportion of the population to like him, that takes some talent.

Survivorship bias.
You don't hear about all the Elons who made a bad bet with the money from their dad's apartheid emerald mine, and ended up living meager multi-millionaire lives instead.
- This. A million times this! For so many things in life. So many persons fail to get this. Entrepreneurs, billionaires, success-stories.
  Succeeding doesn't mean you made the right decision with the information you had; it means you made the right decision now that we know the outcome.

Why would you do that? Writing a biography is not necessarily an endorsement. Did you read the article? The author reproaches him quite a bit, accusing him of stealing an idea and having terrible programming skills.
Because you support nazis?
- Yeah, like, really. Author seems critical of Musk.
Are you under the impression that this book would make Musk money?

Eh, I despise Musk and believe he is a grave threat.

But this "Musk isn't smart" narrative is a waste of time and underestimating Musk makes him more dangerous.

Tesla was a nothing burger company before he acquired it. SpaceX has been highly successful under his leadership. Musk may not have provided much technical knowledge, but he's accomplished too much for it to be random luck, and steering such companies, even if not on a daily basis, is going to require applied intellectual skill.

Edit: guys you can downvote all you want but underestimating Musk just weakens your position and aids him. You're not going to an Ivy League school with average or below intelligence.

You're also not starting and guiding various companies to high level success if you're dumb. Yes Musk has failed projects. Essentially every company and many if not most entrepreneurs have suffered failures.

Allegedly he also got a relatively high SAT score (1400) according to Isaacson, a respected biographer (I'd want to see hard proof however).

Musk's IQ is probably something like 125, not 160. But it's not going to be 90 or other like that.

But I guess you can go ahead and play into his hand and boost him by underestimating him.

Imma quote from the article.
Abramson noted, “It is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them."
- Musk's wealth isn't the best indicator of his intelligence. It's more circumstantial evidence at best.
  "corporations with those who own them."
  This veers towards been an non sequitur. The claim isn't that Musk is the corporation or that he is responsible for every decision. However, he is one of the (and probably THE) prominent voices in his companies and his decisions can massively impact the company's trajectory. One success is luck, multiple successes suggests there's a lot more than luck at play.
SpaceX was the leading private space company before he acquired it - it has actually lost ground to competitors since then but has an extremely passionate team behind it.
Tesla was the first company to seriously take a swing at automated response with an eye to FSD - they've since fallen far behind Waymo and other competitors.
When Musk worked at PayPal Thiel described him as a crazy risk taker and had him ousted as CEO while he was on two weeks of PTO for his honeymoon.
Musk is a huge fucking dumbass with enough money to fail horribly over and over.
- you're not getting into UPENN being a complete idiot. Whoever started the company, Musk oversaw periods of the growth in SpaceX, Tesla, Paypal etc.
  Musk is (edit: not) the smartest person in the world like he thinks he is. But it's nearly an objective fact that he's not stupid.
  This is such a dumb hill to die on, and more importantly it benefits Musk.
  edit: and as for failed programs, welcome to the world of business. Google, Amazon, Microsoft Apple, etc. constantly launch ideas that don't pan out. Are their leaders and engineers and everyone else dumb because a project failed?
You're really underestimating the contributions of people like the COO (Shotwell, who by all accounts, really reigns Musk in) and the actual engineering talent at SpaceX. Musk is hardly the first to come up with some of the aerospace ideas, but SpaceX is the first to push through the failure to success through a rapid prototype model.
- lmao I am underestimating no one. Guys... touch some grass.
  Musks's technical knowledge is probably pretty mid. Musk sure as hell isn't designing the rockets.
  Acknowledging that Musk isn't an idiot in no way devalues the work of the many, many intelligent people around him. Why you'd think that I'm taking anything away from anyone else is baffling. Literally baffling. How did you come to that conclusion?
You can still think he's grossly incompetent without dismissing him as a threat. I don't care about his IQ since he's never done any tests to prove anything; his actions alone tell me that he's a dangerous moron.
He's not playing 4D chess here. His goals are to increase control, enrich himself and punish opposition. He's done this before with Xitter and Tesla. There is literally a pattern.

I understand that many people dislike Musk and disagree with his politics but to believe he is "lacking intellectually or is without exceptional achievement" is ridiculous. Precisely how many billion dollar companies have all these critics organized and successfully run? Exactly.

A trust fund and Forrest Gump type luck doesn't make a person a genius.
He is really good at talking out of his ass. The moment he starts talking about something your an expert in, the bullshit he spews becomes obvious.
- What area are you an expert in ?
It is not rocket science
- It's not even car design
Successfully?