FWIW estimates put Musk's IQ between 100-110 on the low end and 155. But we don't really know because we don't have the results of an IQ test for him. On the American obsession:
IQ is the term of choice for the man who doesn’t just think he’s smart, but thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. Americans have long been obsessed with IQ, and the human rankings it facilitates, but rarely is that fixation stated so plainly, so incessantly, and at such high levels. To some of our most powerful people, IQ has come to stand in as the totalizing measure of a person — and a justification for the power that they claim.
Trump has spent much of his second term sorting humans into “low IQ individuals” (Kamala Harris, Representative Al Green) and “high IQ individuals” (cryptocurrency boosters, Musk, Musk’s 4-year-old son).
But a wider public fascination with IQ is in the water. (Sometimes literally: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has opposed the fluoridation of tap water, claiming that it causes a decrease in IQ.) Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is seeking “super high-IQ” applicants. Vice President JD Vance has insulted the British former diplomat Rory Stewart on X, writing that “he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.” In February, a senior Trump administration official asked employees of the CHIPS Program Office to supply their SAT or IQ scores.
An interest in juicing IQ through training and supplements bridges the manosphere and the parenting internet. Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed “misogynist” and online masculinity idol who faces human-trafficking charges in Britain and Romania, claims an IQ over 140 and preaches on a podcast about how to “rewire your brain for relentless success.” Nucleus, a genetic testing start-up backed by the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, made a stir last year with a test that supposedly calculates an “intelligence score based on your DNA.” As the writer Max Read pointed out recently, some X users have begun asking, apparently earnestly, how “low IQ” people experience the world, as if they are fundamentally less human.
Such fixations are a long American tradition, and they are cresting again now at a key moment in history — at the consummation between Silicon Valley capitalism and right-wing political power.
And Silicon Valley, of course, is obsessed with the intelligence of AI systems, giving them batteries of standard tests and, I assume here an there, IQ tests as well. The objective is to create systems that are smarter than humans in every way - and then hope that they don't decided to dominate and even eliminate us. (Hess gets to this at the end of her article.)
Hess then goes into a history of intelligence testing, including this little nugget:
In his 2023 history “Palo Alto,” Malcolm Harris writes of Stanford as an institution built on eugenic thinking. Before Leland Stanford founded Stanford University, he established what he called the “Palo Alto System” to classify, train and breed superior racehorses at an intense pace of production — a system that sometimes resulted in the snapped tendons of weaker colts but had the benefit of weeding out inferior horses before investing too much in their development. Once Stanford applied this punishing system to human achievement, it seeded a century-long obsession with intelligence scoring in Silicon Valley — and in the America that it increasingly shaped.
Then there's this:
It was America that pioneered the use of IQ for punitive ends, using low scores to deny certain immigrants entry to the country, to forcibly sterilize disabled people, and to push low-ranking soldiers into the line of fire while elevating high scorers to officer positions.
Though the crimes of Nazi Germany compromised the global popularity of eugenics, and encouraged the disavowal of the word, the British and American victories in the World War II also worked as an endorsement of the use of IQ testing in organizing war and, more generally, identifying elites.
In 1958, the British sociologist Michael Young used the term “meritocracy” to describe an emerging society organized around “merit” as the new justification for hierarchical power, which he defined as a combination of IQ scores and effort.
The last section of the article is entitled, "When Intelligence Is a Commodity," and reviews various commercial ventures aimed at boosting intelligence ending, of course, with AI.
There's more at the link. FWIW I have a number of posts focused on IQ.
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