What Is Elon Musk's I.Q.?

^{Image "Elon Musk" by Debbie Rowe on Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by S.A. 3.0}

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. 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...