Think the scoring has changed over the years but when he took it 1400 would have been the general goal for top schools but not off the charts (1450 for me)
I think people should seriously stop making other people feel bad about SATscores and bragging about their kids like you and others are doing in these comments.
My parents made me retake a 1440 to improve my chances of getting a scholarship. It worked, except for the fact that I immediately failed out of my first year of college.
From test-ninjas.com, but read similar points elsewhere. Elon wouldn't have been accepted to an Ivy or Stanford, unless as a legacy or son of a big donor.
I got about 1380 on my sat and I went into it on four hours of sleep and no caffeine or breakfast. Some accomplishment that totally can't be studied for.
Scored a 1420 on my first try and a 1480 on my second. Therefore Musk and Smith MUST acknowledge that my opinion is more valid than theirs. And my opinion is that they’re both dumbshits.
Also: how many people that you encounter, everyday--in class, at the coffee shop or gas station, at the grocery store, waiting in line at a car wash--what percentage of those people are *clearly* thinking harder and more critically than these self-appointed fools?
The reply-guy comments are hilariously poignant examples of cognitive dissonance..."Elon's 1400 SAT proves he's a genius; every reply that says that they scored much higher is just a test-taking nerd"
Now I am curious what Noah got. Is 1400 impressive to Noah because that is what he got? Or is it impressive because Noah took it and bombed?
Or did Noah not take it at all and just doesn't understand anything about it?
We had a new dean once boast, on his intro visits to departments, about his perfect GRE score. He was in his 60s and everyone thought he was sad, not smart.
The SAT as a measure of intelligence is problematic in so many ways. It’s racially biased & prep correlates w/privilege. It also doesn’t test comprehension. I thought I was an idiot until college. My history professor was the 1st to encourage me. Essay format w/critical thinking.
As a historian, what is your opinion of the claim that Elon Musk is a more successful industrialist than Henry Fond, and indeed is the greatest industrialist in American history?
He has a moderately successful car company that has a ridiculously overvalued market capitalization. Ford invented modern mass production, so there no comparison. There are some political similarities, though.
Historians still write about Ford and Fordism as a major shift in industrialization and consumption. Contemporaries to Ford, even those hostile to him like the Bolsheviks, recognized the importance of Ford.
In business terms, Musk is an overvalued shadow of Ford.
Musk had the good fortune to be able to buy his way into companies that were already going. He DID NOT found Tesla. He just took it over. The one vehicle he did design - the cybertruck -- is synonmous more with Edsell than Henry.
To put it succinctly, in my weird alternative school graduating class of 44, we had 5 kids at 99th percentile. So around that score at the rough time period he would have taken it.
93rd percentile, apparently. It's a good score, but it's not like it's super genius level. Plus it was his second go at it, and it's a thing you can study for; I took the SAT once and got a 1310, then the ASVAB a year later and got a comparatively higher score.
Hard to believe it's 93rd percentile, but, also, that means like 10% of people who go to college probably got that good a score or better, maybe more. Nice enough, not headline material.
It's also using a test designed for one purpose as evidence for an unrelated matter. The SAT was designed to determine academic readiness for college, not evaluate a person's intelligence.
My 1460 got me scholarships to a top 50 school that covered what my Pell grants didn’t. Shoutout to the government for sending a smart but poor first gen kid to college.
So the original post either has a typo or no one mentioned in it knows much about the SAT. In any case, it's more important to focus on countering how his drug & ego fueled brain is destroying our safety & our country.
Even though English is my third language, I scored 700, and THREE 800 on achievement tests. And I’m not remotely qualified to run any agency in government without training for a considerable time.
Who the fork do these people think they are?
I took the SAT in 8th grade as part of a gifted and talented program in Minnesota and got a 1450. Then went on to get a 1590 when I took it to apply to college.
That test doesn’t mean a damn thing. I had a 700 math score and I was a low B math student. I had a lower verbal grade and professors used a paper I wrote as the model in their writing seminar class.
oh boy...i, when a teenager, just coasted in, didn't double check and got better than that, and wow, i just got into solely ohio state. all those other colleges i applied to must have been scared of me and rejected me in fear.
I scored a 1590 & a 36 on the SAT & ACT, respectively. A high school counselor had me do an IQ Test after that (he was going for his Doctorate & needed a test subject), it came in at 169.
What does this mean?
It means I’m good at taking tests. Also, this is the 1st time I’ve mentioned this since HS!
A high score on the SAT is not an indication you understand the world. Both James Woods and Tommy Lee Jones had perfect scores. One is a great actor. The other is a raving lunatic
That's a joke. I went through the UK system. Was obsessed with going to Cornell (Carl Sagan). W/ two years' high school left I was scoring 1600 on SATs. Careers advisor leveraged this to talk me down from Cornell and send me to U. of Cambridge instead. (In the UK system one specialized earlier.)
Lol I went back and did the ACT conversion just to confirm that I outscored him. But yeah, I knew better than to brag about my score. (Even in the sticks, it was common to hear you needed a perfect score to succeed and a lot of my peers pulled it off.)
I have no idea what my SAT score was. Because it’s not important! Why would I think about that as an adult with a life I am proud of and continue to work on improving? What does it say about people who do care about this? I also have no idea what my IQ is. Because it doesn’t matter.
Mine was 1340, and my English score had dropped from my prior 1270. Big deal, it has some utility, but even the guys who wrote The Bell Curve didn't think it has much utility on an individual level. Elon got really obsessed with a few things, got rich as a result.
And thinks that makes him an expert on everything now, when really, because he's been deep in a few things, he's more ignorant than most about most things. He doesn't even have average person levels of knowledge.
I took the SAT once, scored a 1490 (perfect verbal, 690 on math because I finished calculus as a sophomore and then stopped taking math classes), and I am woefully unequipped to run both a rocket company and a government
Lol, 1400...my Asian parents made me take the test repeatedly for not getting a 1600, and I had close to 1400 in 8th grade. I then spent my freshman year in college getting straight Cs with a bunch of other overachievers because we didn't know how to study or handle freedom from overbearing parents
Funny, those were my scores. I hated math, almost flunked it at MIT but went into a very quantitative radiology specialty (nuclear medicine; I was very empirical). My husband is an engineer working in embedded systems and had much lower scores that I had. He is a sought-after part-time worker.
ooh this is fun - I got the highest GRE score in my grad school class and also am pretty sure I'm currently last in class rank. Not much of a correlation!
1380 here, with a great verbal/ok math split also. Apparently I'm a borderline genius with my crap job and normie life. 20 more points and I could've run SpaceX, damn
And nothing of the raw numbers people throw around address the intangibles. Kid with “lower” IQ & mediocre SAT but has upper middle class stability + connections, high-scoring kid whose family doesn’t. This is why—hm sounds like someone’s trying to break in my front door nbd I’m sure, I’ll just brb
@jsweetli.bsky.social came here to say the same thing. did i ever tell you i got a regents diploma through a loophole and that's why i was always in ms topazio's room? i took a language and art sequence with no science or math. i couldn't pass regents 1 🙃
I got a perfect verbal and and the bombed the math section bercause I have discalculia. Oh and I only took it once. this was back when 1600 was perfect score.
I took the PSAT and got 750 on the math and 770 on the verbal, with no prep. (Didn’t take the SAT because I wasn’t applying to any USian schools.) I too am not qualified to run a company or a government.
Yeah….my brother took the SAT and got one wrong. Didn’t want to go to college (despite the phone calls from Harvard and Yale.) Decided he wanted to pursue his passion: to captain a barge on the Mississippi River. So that’s what he did for the rest of his life. And he was happy.
My family lived on a WI farm near the Mississippi. In the summers, when my parents weren’t looking, he would just disappear. My dad used to search for him in river towns. My brother was wicked smart - a true river rat. When he died, we scattered his ashes where he was always happiest - the river.
My dad did 1600 and was in college at age 13 in ny state. Got a few degrees. Abandoned it all to be a fishing guide in northern Canada and never looked back.
I took it once. With an insane hangover. Scraped out just under 1200, but it didn't matter because I was number four in my class and got to go to UT automatically anyway. I would argue that internalizing this entire calculation at 17 makes me smarter than Elon Musk.
the idea a 1400 on the SAT means you're a genius is just laughable, especially on a SECOND try. Like nearly every student I had could easily have done with minimal work and practice
the 2nd try thing is truly the wild part! I went to a public school in Wyoming and the only SAT prep available was an SAT for dummies book and my first attempt was about the same as that. 1400 on a 2nd try is not a brag worthy showing
perfect verbal GRE, also almost failed out of grad school (because I disrespected a required course in the department and the professor rightly nailed my ass to the wall for it).
This, my parents were going to grad school for child psychology giving me constant standardized tests growing up - I became very calm about them and had an understanding what they were like
This helped me greatly in schooling - parents, make your children test subjects jk
I got a good enough score for the colleges I had applied to on my first try but had already scheduled my second. So I got really really high just to see what would happen and I scored 10 points higher.
Heck, I didn’t even come close to that, but I can tell you by actual real life experience that staff cuts really make basic office operations massively inefficient.
Yeah, I got a perfect score on the verbal SAT, but that’s because most of that test involved basic reading proficiency, so all it shows is that I can read.
SAT question:
- Read this text
- Answer questions about what the text says
- The text is RIGHT THERE, and I can read what it says, easy peasy!
As someone with a long history of being good at standardized tests, hard agree. Means I'm good at testing but doesn't have much to do with wisdom, judgment or making good decisions.
🙌 I scored so low in math that when I started college I was in 090 math. Finished with a pharmacology PhD, and 3.5-4.0 gpa even with Ochem 1/2 and calc 2/3. 🤷♀️ It’s like you can’t judge us all on the same metric at the same time and place.
Mine is. I read science fiction and rapidly arranged a lifetime of cosmology training into rapid instant intergalactic transmission travel, aka inter super cell galaxy cluster exploration of the unobservable fringes of our expanding universe. Wow!
This is so true. It doesn't measure critical thinking. I wrote my nursing test, so hung over because I had been celebrating finally finishing four years. I went through it fast and got a nearly perfect score. When I went to work, I started learning.
Same, I showed up after having gotten no sleep and doing no prep and got a 1400, I didn’t know shit but I knew how to take tests. This is not a real skill for the real world it turns out.
Same. Well, I'm pretty sure I could run things better than Elon, but so could a slightly above average hamster, so I don't think the SAT score is really relevant there.
I got a 750 math and 600 verbal when I took the SAT my freshman year. The irony is that when I took the GMAT for grad school, my verbal and math scores completely flip flopped and the delta was even more extreme. Think I was actually below avg in math on the GMAT.
I was about average on math in my country's equivalent test but like top .4% verbal, i assumed id be good-ish at both. Such unbalanced results are probably not great when combined with insecurity + big ego, which I think is unfortunately a common combination.
Earlier in life it took me a bit to figure out how to deal with being able to talk big game about anything without necessarily knowing much at all. I've been surrounded by people who call me out constantly, I shudder to think what I'd be like if people around me just went along with it.
I feel like that's adjacent to what we're seeing in people like musk.
Imagine knowing deep inside you need regular reality checks but having the constant temptation of endless cult worship that asks nothing but for you to be the meme.
"His strategy, Negassi said, was all about preparation. Through practice questions, he learned that the SAT isn’t a test of intelligence — it’s about pattern recognition, memorization and time management, Negassi said."
Except many people believe the SAT is a substitute for an IQ test, or an indication of future abilities and potential, except it isn’t.
Actual IQ tests are one on one, observational, oral, written, and multidimensional tests. When properly done they take into account so many differences
I mean IQ tests have their share of problems too but yes, the SAT/ACT are not good approximations of an IQ test. There's a whole measurability bias at play here that's complicated and I don't *entirely* blame people for looking at the field and just going "whatever I'm going to pretend this is good"
Yes, that's what I think but clearly these people don't. And I think there is a wide disparity in what they believe it is. A few who think g exists and is a measure of the ability to learn, and a bunch who think IQ is measuring some kind of brain superpower that defines everything in life
All I know is that I tested with a pretty high IQ back in high school but you’d certainly never know it if you judged by my lack of success afterwards.
I did really well on that online IQ test where it kept firing pages of questions at you until you gave up, and judged people who gave up faster as smarter.
So I should take my 1560 SAT and barge into ELoon’s office and tell him he has to take orders from me from now on? (I was killer on standardized tests…)
I can’t recall at all what I got on my sat. I graduated with honors from the university of Chicago and thought I was pretty smart. Not one person has cared in more than 30 working years during which I’ve worked with brilliant people who never even went to university at all.
I took the SAT ONCE and got a 1400. Also, @drdavegoldberg.bsky.social and I went to high school together, and he got an 800 on the math PSAT and I got an 800 on the verbal so together, he and I should rule of all these shitbags. Dave, are you ready to make the national parks transgender again?
No, but he’s three years older than me and I couldn’t recall my SAT score if you put a gun to my head. That was over 30 years ago! But I guess if he’s a dork ass loser who thinks 1400 makes him a genius he’d remember it.
Smith is one of the most ridiculous examples of how merit in America means being white and going to the right college. He’s been a bozo for years and now it’s his time to shine.
This reminds me of what Lord Acton said about great men. "Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.” Great intelligence makes bad people and crazy people more dangerous. Better if Musk had been born a moron.
That's when it's time to remind everyone that he had a student visa and left it so his naturalization form is invalid and he should be deported..... like he opens the door and no one just walks in.
Since the SAT isn't a standardized test given to students in South Africa (it isn't generally required for university entry outside the USA) I would be curious as to under what conditions he took it, and how old he was at the time.
Assuming he applied to US colleges before winding up at Queens University, but if so, why would he have told people about a test score that never benefited him? (A: Because he's very insecure)
Musk moved to Canada, started at Queens University there, then transferred to Penn after 2 years. Presumably he would have needed an SAT score to as a transfer applicant, but it would be interesting to know when he took it, and whether he applied to US schools initially.
shouldn't have hurt his test scores if he was older than the average student. In fact, he should have done BETTER. It tests vocabulary and math. That are high school level. If you are beyond high school level when you take it, you should have those concepts already.
Hey, I read that article. The message of the article was to dismiss him at your peril because he is destroying our institutions (which Noah's previous post was about how Trump and Elon are selling us out. Seemed reasonable considering they are successfully destroying our institutions
He's my age, so he would have taken the same format as me (max score 1600 no essay).
I only took it once- got 1370 1st try and my only studying was going through a couple of those published mini practice tests to review question format. I figured I either knew the stuff or I didn't.
35 or so years ago I was a part time reader of admissions applications for a school whose campus you frequent. SAT scores like that did nothing to raise a prospective student in the direction of the top of the pile.
Yeah, now let's try his life again growing up poor even with that SAT score.
It's bizarre how those who inherit wealth, steal the work of other's do full pr blitzes to convince people of their merit.
I scored higher than that on my only try. But I don't remember talking about it since freshman week in 1987, because it is just a test of a kind of academic preparation. Also I grew up.
as a 7th grader in a gifted ELP program, I took the SATs as a learning experience. I scored a 790... which put me at the halfway scoring that year, and it still got me letters of application from about nine universities.
I got 1410 and It’s not a humble brag because I readily admit I think I’m smarter than most people.
Being smart does not make someone qualified or competent.
Or sane.
I just remember sitting at the end of the row in my first ROTC class. We had to fill out 3 x 5s that included our SATs. I collected them and was easily the lowest. Worked my ass off and graduated with the highest grade point in detachment. Never thought about SATs again
Wow, many folks here happy to declare their SAT scores and prolly their IQ as well. My daughter attended the same insufferable public high school as Nate Silver and Larry Page. I should apologize. So glad my step dad could not hold a job and I attended a vast array of America’s crappiest schools.
I mean, I got a 1570 on the SAT, a 36 on the ACT, & 170/170 on the GRE. This qualifies me to tell y'all that standardized tests are extremely bullshit that don't predict someone's strength as a student or their potential for improvement, and it would be nice if we didn't rely on them for admissions.
I'm not a true Noahpinion believer, and he often rubs me the wrong way, but I think you trying to take his post and turn it into some sort of "gotcha" is pretty clearly EXACTLY what he was talking about in the article.
That's not exactly what he said. He argues that Musk is neither stupid nor incompetent. I think he ignores some important information in making that case, but he's right that Tesla and SpaceX are both significant data points pointing to what Musk is good at....1/
Tesla and SpaceX are just data points showing Musk has some talent for investing money and managing his image. No indication of any kind of special technical knowledge. To me, every time he talks tech he sounds like an overconfident beginner who read a couple of magazines on the subject.
Both Tesla and SpaceX have structures in place to *mitigate* Elon. By their own admission.
Each project he's had significant influence on has been at the bottom of both company's success rating.
Elon's One Competency is generating a personality cult, nothing business.
Yes, Musk is a wrecking ball at a mature company. But I was struck by what my engineer-nephew said as he was graduating (from U. Mich.--a top engineering school). All the strongest of his classmates, he said, wanted to work at Tesla. Why? Because of the challenge...1/
It's also possible Musk *was* everything his fanatics claim, but that was years ago. Everybody loses their fastball sooner or later. But the reputation lives on.
2/ Anecdata, to be sure. But Smith argues that Musk is good at constructing a work force, promoting strong members, ruthlessly firing those he deems insufficiently committed or competent, and GTD really freaking fast.
There are examples of all of that in the history of Tesla and SpaceX....
He didn't invent tesla he bought it. How did he get the money? Off of PayPal which he didn't fund either and was bought out from his own middling venture (x). They paid money to get rid of Elon from PayPal. Where did Elon's money for original x come from? His dad.
Definitely anecdata, but also not necessarily true competency in those areas.
I've worked with numerous former Tesla employees, who talked regularly about losing key critical "incompetent" employees and how the company had been falling further and further behind.
3/ There are also examples of crazed, destructive, often illegal behavior (which Smith elides).
It's not a huge point, but I think it is important not to fall into the trap of thinking our adversaries are self-limited...that Musk and Trump are too flawed to succeed long or even medium term...
2/ I am bemused by his sideswipe on history as a discipline, about which I have many thoughts. But the problem of Musk isn't that he's incompetent; it's that what he's good at is catastrophic when applied to the way gov't works.
Smith is a very problematical pundit...but he's not always wrong.
Unclear. Noah Smith said that's what he got in the newsletter Kruse (I'm guessing) & I read. Don't really care & didn't check.
I agree with Smith, though, that Musk isn't stupid in a formal IQ sense, and that IQ is not a useful metric here anyway. Musk's other things, tho, and evil is one of them.
I don't read Noah Smith but I'm making a larger point that they talk about IQ etc and call other people low IQ but it's all generally self reported nonsense to fund their shitty worldview and we need to stop accepting the base "facts" promulgated by known liars
I also think that marinating long enough in the rw information bubble makes people stupider. People complain about John Kennedy (LA) faking being a rube - no, he's just actually dumber now
A person with a decent vocabulary from just reading a lot can just study and memorize the subset of words that the SAT tests for and pretty much guarantee a perfect score at least on the verbal side, no tutor (I did this). 1400 is not at all impressive on a college application.
Yep. I guarantee that nearly all of the CEOs in the nation had SAT tutors/courses paid for by their parents and did test prep and still did just ok, but they probably don't even admit to/remember that.
It really is kind boggling to me because, for all of these people, I guarantee all their peers were doing it. I was absolutely not a dedicated high school student, but I went to an upscale HS, and test prep was *everywhere*.
You would just obtain these prep books, God knows where you got them.
Forgive me for pointing this out but once you graduate from college, no one cares what your ACT or SAT score was. It’s a lot like wearing your HS Class Ring to work when you’re 40!
My parents were “whelmed” when I had that score (or marginally better) the one time I took it. Not angry: just not impressed. But my father was a prof., so I grew up with other academic brats and the idea that Brown was a backup school… 🙄
It's not even nearly perfect and a lot of people get that high on their first without actively studying specifically for the SAT. I got like 1380 on four hours of sleep and no caffeine or food.
The only real data we have on him pegs him as having a decent SAT (below mine tho lol), an unexceptional college student who ALMOST started a higher-level physics program, but dropped out. To some people that sounds exceptional, but it's a pretty pedestrian story in higher ed.
I was a MassComm major who never took Calculus and ended up in Physics for Geology/Astrophysics majors because of a schedule conflict. Even I managed a 2.5 and didn't have to drop it.
The number of young hot shots who think they're going to be the next Richard Feynman & then wash out the second they get handed grad school level material is huge enough to be a trope.
Also a trope: billionaires/CEOs pretending they have some special physics brains
Musk almost immediately washing out of his graduate program because making money by playing with money seemed more compelling (& the story doesn't get ingenious from there: reading his PayPal days is not exactly a study in some genius-level coding) is precisely a higher-ed sorting mechanism at work
If he had been some sort of physics/engineering wunderkind, he would have already had achievements and fields of study pegged out that he wanted to keep working on in his graduate studies. He didn't, apparently: got decent enough grades to get into a program, but no compelling reason to stay/do it
I also scored 1400 on the SAT (on the first try) and thus volunteer to run the government. Did not realize this qualified me, would have applied earlier had I known.
I took it once, and scored high 1400's. I am also taller, and, i bet, have a larger head than Elon. By those stats, i am way more of a "godlike genius" than he is.
I’m only two years younger than Musk, and my best guess is 5% of people in my public high school class got 1400 or higher. It’s a good score but it’s not like whhoooooaaaaa
I got a 1430. In my ubercompetitive wealthy high school that made me solidly mediocre but it got me admission to the decent-er of our major state schools.
One of the brutal things about really believing in statistical distributions is that differential success of individuals is a nearly deterministic guaranteed outcome even when the system itself is meritless.
I don't recall my SAT but it was right around 1400. I was a bright kid too! Elon is less than a year younger than me.
Why aren't I launching satellites today? It has a lot more to do with me not starting out in life with a Scrooge McDuck like pile of emeralds in the basement than how smart I am.
I did well on the SAT purely because I'm a lazy ADHDer who hyperfocuses on tests, so I developed test-taking skills to compensate for having not done the reading or the homework. I promise you: you don't want me in charge of the nuclear arsenal.
Vance tried to insult Rory Stewart by saying he was a 110 IQ intellect who thinks he's a 130. So Vance is just as obsessed with IQ, and thinks 130 is very high. Who even talks about IQ beyond the age of 12?
Ma was a teacher and in one class had a developmentally delayed student who was being mainstreamed. On one aptitude test (in the days you filled in little ovals in an slander sheet) kid decided to fill it out to make a butterfly image. Inadvertently cracked the code and was labeled a genius.
A lot of "lazy as hell" kids are actually decently smart, they just have undiagnosed ADHD or something similar. If you understand a concept, you may get nothing from doing homework, so you just don't do it.
The score is based on the first relevant Google result, where someone just matched up percentiles from the SAT to IQ scores with no underlying research, FWIW.
This is actually example how to make case against Noah claims.
(I personally don't live in country with SAT and don't care much, what amount IQ points Musk has. If something, I would error on the side of his competence, because he's dangerous fascist.)
Comments
I'm not telling you my SAT score (you already know it anyway)
Either way, i didn't study for the SAT at all and was out until 1 am the night before, and i got 1380, so I'm pretty sure 1400 isn't that impressive.
Talk about an emperor with no clothes ...
Or did Noah not take it at all and just doesn't understand anything about it?
(Honestly, too long ago to remember, and it’s an odd thing to hold on to anyway.)
Perfect SAT score here, but I couldn’t have written or thought my way out of a paper bag at the time.
If you do well on the SAT you'll probably do ok in college, and that's about it.
In business terms, Musk is an overvalued shadow of Ford.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177540/forging-global-fordism?srsltid=AfmBOoq8ZTEyobmzlASdnF0j0j0jWnFEEXNsWxXGa4C9nGJPnPqUHKri
Duke!
“Liar!”
SO GOOD.
Just waiting for him to break out "I'm rubber, you're glue..."
- Noah Smith
Who the fork do these people think they are?
I have 2 masters, a phd, published three books, and am generally considered to be successful. Those scores mean jack. 😜
What does this mean?
It means I’m good at taking tests. Also, this is the 1st time I’ve mentioned this since HS!
I wouldn't give anyone crap for it, but I wouldnt be impressed.
1400 is not that rare.
Guessing Noah didn't break 1000.
Before that period it was 2400
It's a decent score but far from "generational genius" territory.
https://bsky.app/profile/drewharwell.com/post/3liu23ke6fs26
You respect democracy & are brave smart & articulate. You would surround yourself with similar people. WE NEED YOU.
And I also decided at that point math wasn’t gonna be my jam.
I’ve never had an original experience in my life.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4096990/
Awesome, adding to watchlist
Food for thought.
it was nice for college admissions and means absolutely nothing about my ability to run anything
This helped me greatly in schooling - parents, make your children test subjects jk
So yeah I'm just good at taking tests.
The people dismantling the edu system are the same ones screaming that it decided they were better than everyone else. Sus
SAT question:
- Read this text
- Answer questions about what the text says
- The text is RIGHT THERE, and I can read what it says, easy peasy!
Imagine knowing deep inside you need regular reality checks but having the constant temptation of endless cult worship that asks nothing but for you to be the meme.
"I've had reccurring nightmares
That I was loved for who I am
and missed the opportunity
to be a better man."
https://www.nj.com/news/2025/02/meet-the-nj-high-school-student-who-earned-a-perfect-sat-score.html
Actual IQ tests are one on one, observational, oral, written, and multidimensional tests. When properly done they take into account so many differences
And, honestly? My rocket company sucks.
I am only just barely aware of how poorly informed I am.
if anyone wants to do the math on how many people score higher in an average year lol
but anyway, bragging about test scores as an adult is deeply pathetic and those numbers are in no way an accurate metric for overall intelligence 👍
Elon Musk is not a genius.
Also, do we have any confirmation that Elon didn't take the essay section and score 1400 out of 2400?
Apparently he thinks it’s impressive to *someone* he’s desperate to impress.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/22/elon-musk-admits-cheating-at-video-games-chat-transcript-appears-to-show
It's certainly possible he did take it at some point, but was also likely older than the average person who does.
And I didn’t actually study for shit.
It’s not “genius”-level. I didn’t study for a test I shouldn’t have been taking because I knew you could just game the SATs to a point.
I only took it once- got 1370 1st try and my only studying was going through a couple of those published mini practice tests to review question format. I figured I either knew the stuff or I didn't.
I was good at math but I hated it, plus I wanted to have the schedule room for some career-aligned electives.
It's bizarre how those who inherit wealth, steal the work of other's do full pr blitzes to convince people of their merit.
800? 900?
Being smart does not make someone qualified or competent.
Or sane.
For those who want to read the whole thing: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/only-fools-think-elon-is-incompetent
I wouldn't trust me to run a lemonade stand.
Each project he's had significant influence on has been at the bottom of both company's success rating.
Elon's One Competency is generating a personality cult, nothing business.
Yes, Musk is a wrecking ball at a mature company. But I was struck by what my engineer-nephew said as he was graduating (from U. Mich.--a top engineering school). All the strongest of his classmates, he said, wanted to work at Tesla. Why? Because of the challenge...1/
Also, there's the drug addiction.
There are examples of all of that in the history of Tesla and SpaceX....
I've worked with numerous former Tesla employees, who talked regularly about losing key critical "incompetent" employees and how the company had been falling further and further behind.
It's not a huge point, but I think it is important not to fall into the trap of thinking our adversaries are self-limited...that Musk and Trump are too flawed to succeed long or even medium term...
Smith is a very problematical pundit...but he's not always wrong.
I agree with Smith, though, that Musk isn't stupid in a formal IQ sense, and that IQ is not a useful metric here anyway. Musk's other things, tho, and evil is one of them.
(Not fighting; just a yes-and)
You would just obtain these prep books, God knows where you got them.
I worked in Silicon Valley and Silicon Forest. Employers don't care about that stuff.
Just gets exponentially worse from there.
(Joking, the SAT is a signaling tool for when you’re 17 and shouldn’t be the basis of anything after)
Also a trope: billionaires/CEOs pretending they have some special physics brains
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA
I got a better score on my second try and successfully avoided UCLA, which was a great choice.
Ah, wait, I think Dark Helmet has the answer---
*(And by almost perfect, I mean literally just. One question wrong. XD Which--I almost would have preferred to get a *lower* score)
Even if it’s a legit measure of “brilliance” (fact check: nyah) it still wouldn’t explain his differential success!
Why aren't I launching satellites today? It has a lot more to do with me not starting out in life with a Scrooge McDuck like pile of emeralds in the basement than how smart I am.
This friend is also one of the most creative and artistic people I’ve ever met, is super smart, but cannot function in school
SATs and IQ are not as informative as people think
Then he makes case that IQ cannot capture the whole picture and Elon has other skills.
You can make case, why Noah is wrong, but this statement of yours is a lie.
(I personally don't live in country with SAT and don't care much, what amount IQ points Musk has. If something, I would error on the side of his competence, because he's dangerous fascist.)
But what Kevin said is a lie.