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At an FT event a few years ago, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was asked what painful lessons he learned when founding a software company. His answer surprised audiences at the time, but it resonates even more today.
Gates said that in his early 20s, he was convinced that “IQ is fungible,” but he was wrong. His goal was to hire the smartest people he could find and build a corporate “IQ hierarchy” with the most intelligent employees at the top. He believed that no one would want to work for a boss who was less intelligent than them. “Well, that didn’t work out for long,” he confessed. “By the time I was 25, I realized that IQ comes in many forms.”
For example, Gates said, employees who understand sales and management appear to be smarter in that they are negatively correlated with writing better code and mastering physics equations. Since then, Microsoft has worked to blend different types of intelligence to create effective teams. That seems to have worked, as the company now boasts a market value of over $3 trillion and will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year.
Gates may have learned that lesson early on. But while many of his fellow American tech billionaires share his initial intuition about the superiority of IQ, few seem to have reached his subsequent conclusions. There is a tendency among tech industry giants to believe that it is their special intelligence that has made them so successful and so wealthy, and that others can defend it as well.
Moreover, they seem to think that this superior intelligence can be applied anytime and anywhere.
The default assumption of successful founders seems to be that their expertise in building high-tech companies will give them equally valuable insight into the U.S. federal budget deficit, the response to the pandemic, or the war in Ukraine. . For them, fresh information from an unfamiliar field can resemble a divine revelation, even if it is common knowledge to those outside their bubble. . A young American tech millionaire who had dropped out of college and had just returned from a trip to Paris asked me, wide-eyed, if I had ever heard of the French Revolution. Apparently it was incredible.
Given Elon Musk’s widespread presence in the US economy, and now politics, this inevitably leads to questions about the fungibility of Elon Musk’s IQ. The South African-born entrepreneur is endowed with rare intelligence and a clear vision that commands respect from even his fiercest competitors. “I think he’s a hell of a legend,” the CEO of a rival electric car company told me, even though he was personally appalled by the way Musk used his social media company X as a propaganda tool. spoke.
Mr. Musk is good at building cool cars and rocket ships, but his personal brand extension to social media has slumped, and Company X faces an exodus of users and advertisers. Still, Musk used the $44 billion megaphone he bought to help elect Donald Trump. The incoming US president then invited the “super genius” Musk to serve as one of two co-directors of his planned Department of Government Efficiency.
To cut down on bureaucracy, Musk is recruiting “ultra-high IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours a week to cut modest costs.” Musk has already said he wants to cut three-quarters of the federal government’s 400 departments. “99 is enough,” he posted.
These days, Musk would rather troll Gates than listen to him. But he may still be thinking back to Gates’ painful lesson that the smartest people in one field don’t always have the best ideas in others.
There is no doubt that there is a tremendous amount of bureaucratic waste to be cut, but understanding all the public interests, competing agendas, and conflicting interests surrounding government spending requires different types of information.
There’s also a certain irony in a tech billionaire touting the superiority of human intelligence while also working on the AI that might one day surpass it. Google co-founder Larry Page called Musk a “speciesist” for his relentless defense of human intelligence in the face of technological advances.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Musk is working on a solution. He plans to upgrade biological wetware using an electronic brain implant developed by his company, Neuralink, to integrate human and machine intelligence.
That prospect will frighten many, but it may be the ultimate test of whether human IQ is fungible in other ways.
john.thornhill@ft.com
