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Elon Musk and Bill Gates are two people who exemplify what happens when a very high IQ is combined with a passionate commitment to a pursuit. Both men are independent thinkers who stand outside the tribes to which most people belong and form their own judgements and opinions. These opinions are in continuous revision as they discover new facts and build their knowledge.
Bill Gates
Bill’s high intelligence was evident during his elementary school years and he suffered the bullying that typically visits intellectual outliers. In 1972, at age 17, Bill and his friend Paul Allen created Traf-O-Data to make traffic counters using the Intel 8008 processor. The next year, he graduated from Lakeside and with an outstanding score of 1590 out of 1600 on his SAT’s gained entry into Harvard. Though majoring in pre-law, he also took courses in mathematics and computer science. Then, in January 1975, on reading about the Altair 8800, a computer developed by the MITS company, he and Paul presented to MITS a demonstration of how they could program the Altair 8800 to run the BASIC language. On April 4, 1975, Gates and Allen incorporated Microsoft and Gates subsequently dropped out of Harvard, never to return. The rest is history. Microsoft became one of the top corporations in the world and Bill Gates became a billionaire and according to Forbes Media, was the 4th richest man in the world in 2022. Gates has a reported IQ of 160, and continued to emphasize the importance of recruiting the highest IQ’s. In 2005, journalist Richard Karlgaard reported:
I spent five days traveling the country with Gates, and he must have talked about IQ a hundred times. Getting the brightest bulbs to work atMicrosoft has always been his obsession. It’s paid off. Microsoft does close to $40 billion in sales and has some 60,000 employees. That’s a whopping $650,000-plus of revenue per employee, topping IBM’s sales per employee twofold. For more information visit: Bill Gates – Intelligence and IQ
Elon Musk
Elon Musk, like Bill Gates showed intellectual superiority early on life, and like Bill, was a victim of bullying. On one occasion, he was thrown down a flight of stairs and his head was thrust against the pavement resulting in a loss of consciousness. A small scar on his nose reveals the rhinoplasty that restored his crushed cartilage. The high IQ and intensity of purpose evident in Bill Gates is also a defining characteristic of entrepreneur Elon. Born and raised in Pretoria, South Africa, and educated in Canada and the United States, Musk is today the inventor extraordinaire. He began his post secondary education at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada at age 17 and after two years, transferred to the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with a degree in Economics from the Wharton School and a degree in physics from the College of Arts and Science. In 1995, he was accepted into the Ph.D. program at Stanford to study material science and physics, but dropped out after 2 days to pursue an entrepreneurial venture in the emerging internet.
By 1999, the web software company Zip2 that he had co-founded with his brother Kimbal, was purchased by Compaq for $340 million. This was the beginning of Elon’s creation or co-founding of a series of companies, including, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, OpenAI, and Neuralink.
Musk is a high IQ person with a photographic memory. The success of his ventures is attributable to the vision that emanates from his problem solving ability and his capacity to abstract from what is to what might be. For decades, NASA relied on Russian rockets to get its astronauts to the International Space Station. On May 30,2020, America saw the successful launch of its Dragon capsule atop the Falcon-9 rocket made by the American corporation Space X–founded by Musk, known as the man who hires employees based on “evidence of exceptional ability.” The jubilant Elon Musk announced, “I’m really overcome with emotion; it’s been 18 years working towards this goal, so it’s hard to believe that it happened.” Musk’s belief in the importance of hiring those on the basis of exceptional intellectual ability, rather than interpersonal skills, had born fruit. In 2022, Musk was listed in Forbes Media as the richest person in the world with a net worth of $272 billion.
As my high school math teacher used to say, “There is no substitute for brains.”
