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At an FT event a number of years ago, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was asked what painful lessons he had learned while constructing his software company. His answer surprised the audience on the time and resonates much more today.
Gates responded that in his early twenties he was convinced that “IQ was interchangeable” and that he was improper. His goal was to rent the neatest people he could find and construct a company “IQ hierarchy” with the neatest employees at the highest. He assumed that nobody desired to work for a boss who wasn't smarter than them. “Well, that didn’t work for long,” he admitted. “By the time I used to be 25, I knew that IQ appeared to are available different forms.”
Those employees who knew sales and management, for instance, gave the impression to be smart in a way that was negatively correlated with writing good code or mastering physics equations, Gates said. Since then, Microsoft has been working to mix several types of information to create effective teams. It seems to have paid off: the corporate now has a market value of greater than $3 trillion and can rejoice its fiftieth birthday next 12 months.
Gates could have learned this lesson early on. But while lots of his fellow US tech billionaires share his original intuition concerning the primacy of IQ, few appear to have reached his later conclusion. There is a bent for tech titans to consider that it’s their very own special type of intelligence that has allowed them to develop into wildly successful and insanely wealthy, and to advocate for it to others.
Furthermore, they appear to consider that this superior intelligence is applicable anytime and anywhere.
The default assumption of successful founders appears to be that their expertise in constructing tech firms gives them equally worthwhile insight into the U.S. federal budget deficit, pandemic responses, or the war in Ukraine. For them, fresh information from unfamiliar areas sometimes resembles a God-given revelation, even when it’s common knowledge to everyone outside their bubble. A young American tech billionaire, a school dropout who had just returned from a visit to Paris, once asked me, wide-eyed and puzzled, if I had heard of the French Revolution. It was apparently incredible.
This inevitably results in questions on the fungibility of Elon Musk's IQ given his omnipresence within the US economy and now politics. The South African-born entrepreneur is blessed with an exceptional type of intelligence and a transparent vision that commands respect from even his fiercest competitors. “I feel he’s a fucking legend,” the CEO of a rival electric vehicle maker told me, regardless that he was personally appalled at how Musk had used his social media company X as a propaganda tool.
Although Musk is great at constructing cool cars and rocket ships, his personal brand expansion on social media is failing and he finds himself In return, the brand new US president has now invited the “super genius” Musk, one in all two co-leaders of the planned to develop into the Ministry of Government Efficiency.
To cut bureaucracy, Musk is recruiting “small-government revolutionaries with super-high IQs who’re willing to work 80+ hours every week for inglorious cost-cutting.” Musk has already stated that he desires to eliminate three-quarters of the federal government's 400 ministries. “99 is enough,” he posted.
These days, Musk would somewhat troll Gates than take heed to him. Still, he might reflect on Gates' painful lesson: The smartest people in a single field don't all the time have one of the best ideas in others.
There is undoubtedly enormous bureaucratic waste to be curbed, but many differing types of data are needed to grasp all the general public advantages, competing agendas and conflicting interests surrounding government spending.
There can also be a certain irony in tech billionaires trumpeting superior human intelligence while concurrently developing AI that will sooner or later overtake it. Google co-founder Larry Page called Musk a “speciesist” for his stubborn defense of human intelligence within the face of advancing technology.
Of course, Musk is working on an answer: He plans to upgrade our biological wetware using electronic brain implants developed by his company Neuralink to fuse human and machine intelligence.
This prospect will terrify many, but in one other way it could possibly be the final word test of whether human IQ is interchangeable.
