Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday.
Did he even get a real degree?
I’m not convinced he even knows how to code, if we are being honest.
People who know how to code are in agreement that he has no clue.
Elon doesn’t think the government uses SQL. He’s dumb as fucking rocks.
What does that mean? I don’t understand the reference about SQL.
Think of it like this:
“This r**ard thinks the government uses PAPER [SQL]” - Elon Musk
It is literally that standard and common and obviously in use in the government.
(SQL is just a computer language for dealing with data and databases)
Sorry. Yes, I understand what SQL is. I just don’t understand the reference - did fElon make some kind of remark about SQL and/or databases?
Also, for the record, I thought there are/were formats and standards for data within mainframes that pre-dated the SQL standard - such as ISAM. This stuff (COBOL and ISAM) pre-dates my entry into the workforce by a long shot, though, so I’m unsure that the use of COBOL means that ISAM is in play, or if those two things (COBOL and the chosen data store) can be independently selected, at least in typical use cases.
(These are probably the kinds of questions that fElon and his dogebags are unlikely to ask, because it might give the correct impression that they have no idea what the fuck they are talking about. Believe me, I’ve worked with their type, and in fact, with a few of this type right now, LOL. Swaggering cases of Dunning-Kruger poster boys that think they know every-fucking-thing there is to know about anything and everything. People that still have not figured out that a bit of curiosity and at least an ounce of humility goes a much longer way in learning.)
SQL is a language used to format requests to most relational and nonrelational databases. Databases are extremely commonly used for data persistence and retrieval. It’s like saying the government doesn’t use binary - or the government doesn’t use TCP - or the government doesn’t use paper. It uses all these things in abundance.
What about his intellectual bankruptcy?
like kim dotcom. same guy to me.
Who?
There’s this website that listed bunch of stuff about Kim Dotcom and his ventures. (the list barely scratches the surface. But the important thing is that people thought he was hack decades ago.)
When I visited the site last time, I was like “ohhhhh, they’ve found a picture of Kim wearing an SS helmet. I really didn’t know what else I was expecting.”
Wasn’t he German?
I’m surprised that the website doesn’t list Felon Muskow as a charlatan.
Leon came from Apartheid driven wealth, which paid for his education, and learned how to suck the US taxpayers dry while firing people left and right. Fuck him and DOGE. What about his brother Kimball who hides behind the curtains?
Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess
I guarantee his IQ is made up too. Not that an IQ test actually means shit.
IQ tests are combo test of how white and how autistic are you. All tests are biased, and what do you bet when he got his super special smart boy IQ label he was in South Africa and the test administrator was another white dude.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the person administering the test was also paid under the table by Musk Snr to make sure Elon’s result looked better than it actually was.
He was at a private school, it’s just called tuition, and it’s there to make sure powerful people’s kids stay in power. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
No, they test whether you need remedial education in specific areas. They do not assess intelligence as a whole.
IQ tests are not an objective measurement of intelligence! It kinda measures pattern recognition and some other skill! Its a scam to sell preparatory classes for itself!
40-50-ish years ago they quite popular! You were required to take one for uni admissions, for appliying to work… Well before we found out its bs!
It’s a relative measure of performance for narrow and specific set of tasks. It’s not BS, that’s like saying the 100m dash is BS. It’s just that people have wildly overstated the general implications of the measure.
The people who have wildly overstated the implications of IQ are the ones who developed and use it. Your analogy would be more correct if the 100m dash was used to measure the freshness of your breath.
That’s the central problem with IQ. Intelligence as a thing that can be measured is much closer to “freshness of breath” than it is to 100 meters. It’s subjective and colloquial. You admit as much yourself that IQ tests measure something, but not intelligence.
I think there is and always has been massive contention in even defining intelligence. Is it the same as wisdom? What about being smart? Are these all the same thing? How does experience inform success in general problem solving? What even IS a “general” problem?
I think it’s still a valuable tool to assess peoples ability to recognize and apply transformations, implications, boolean operators, and arethmetic sequences.
But the idea that it provides some insight into the innate nature of a mind is preposterous. You CAN study for an IQ test: exactly the 4 things I mentioned are things you can study, and once you’ve mastered you’ll be sitting on a 160+ result.
So, the base underlying assumption that these things are not learnable. That is wrong.
But, the idea that mastery of implication, transformation, boolean operators and arethmetic sequences don’t provide a foundational system for certain tasks is also maybe not quite right either…
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of “athleticism”, which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
To your point that the designers intended it to be a measure of the abstract notion of innate intellectual capacity, yeah maybe that was the attempt. Maybe that’s how they pitched it. It isn’t. Tough shit.
But that doesn’t suddenly imply it’s nothing.
Like most things (a degree, years of experience, SAT score, story points, Myers-Briggs etc etc) capitalism has completely fucked them. Business is so fucking lazy they just want to boil down assesment for suitability to enumerable values on a form. Just because metrics are inappropriately used and abused by capitalism doesn’t mean they’re not measuring something.
So, this was a super lengthy reiteration that IQ tests measure something, but it isn’t “innate general intelligence”. But to say it’s as irrelevant as “freshness of breath” is maybe hyperbolic.
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of “athleticism”, which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
Hard to argue that careful statement!
Hey thought of how it could be used for good, to support:
valuable tool to assess peoples abilit[ies]
I imagine a school administrator examining the tails of their school‘s distribution and using the knowledge to personalize education. Say, a bright kid isn’t being challenged and achieves straight Cs. (Privacy and fairness implications, I know)
Yeah I think using a renamed version of the test could be a good way to try and find gaps between aspiration and current state of foundational skills, for certain aspirations.
If a kid dreams of being a lawyer, but their scores are on the tail end, that’s a perfect opportunity to revisit the foundations of formal logic. Just because some kids have managed to grok those foundational concepts independent of school doesn’t mean others are incapable. Because let’s face it, secondary school isn’t teaching formal logic.
That being said, real tailored mechanisms would be superior to finding gaps. But, in the absence of such mechanisms, an IQ test could be an accessible stand-in.
Myers-Briggs
Myers-Briggs manages to go way beyond in the levels of bullshit compared to even these other items.
My favorite story about corporations using these kinds of tests is when some engineer I knew was interviewing at a few different major engineering firms. One of their HR people told him after one of of several interviews that the next time would also involve a personality test! He knew he had at least 2 other roles in the bag, he was just finishing up this company. He asked her - “are they also going to read my tea leaves?” - and declined to proceed further with that company. Because the notion that HR were gatekeeping for…checks notes…engineering positions at an engineering firm by using such debunked horseshit was something that instilled zero confidence in how the rest of the place might be getting run, and I absolutely don’t blame him. I never had that as part of anyone’s hiring “process” - it was always something introduced later as part of some “team-building exercise”.
My favorite direct experience was when another co-worker who was awake and fine with asking pointed questions asked one of the people administering some “personality test” if she knew if they had done any tests where they gave the “results” to the wrong person, and see how they reacted (he was basically asking if they tested for the Barnum effect). Answer: no. (Of course)
Anyway, I suggest reading The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves
That’s a useful comparison. I like it. There are plenty of popular anecdotes of the world’s best athlete in a particular sport attempting another and being terribly mediocre, so it probably resonates with the average person better than my usual many-types-of-intelligence argument.
If the 100 meter dash was called tetranlon it would be bs! If the intelligence test were called pattern recognition test then it wouldn’t be bs!
The 100m dash measures exactly what it says; the ability to dash 100m. Intelligence Quotient does not measure what it says. That’s the issue. It’s isn’t what it claims to be, so is BS.
We had to take a mandatory IQ test at the beginning of military service, my score was in the highest percentile and because of this I ended up in officer training. It wasn’t the Mensa type test, they measured our language, math and pattern recognition skills with a vast battery of questions with a time limit.
Many friends of mine got average IQ scores in the army test but they are the ones who are really smart and extremely succesful.
In university I got a chance to take the Mensa type test and got ~140 points. I just laughed it off since at the same time I was struggling to pass my courses, while my friends who got average scores passed them with ease.
I do not consider myself really “smart” in any way, I just have a very good memory and I’m pretty adept at solving problems. Otherwise I’m just about as average a guy can be.
Uh-huh and everyone stood up to clap buddy?
You know, its a thing to jerk off to yer fantasies but your fantasy is a high IQ score? Really? Was Ariana Grande not in danger in your dreams or something?
Read it again. This post is not a flex.
He edited his comment, look up his edit history
Yes! If you know how to look up edit history, please do so! There has been no editing on my part.
Pffffffffffffffff 😂
You know its so sad that this might even work out for you, after all Trump supporters too refused to read the jan files
But you have yet to answer my one question! Does your miniscular penis feel larger for lying on the internet?
No.
The whole point - which you seem to have missed - was that getting a “good” score in some test can mean very little or nothing in real life.
It just means that you’re good at that sort of mental exercise.
No that meant that you could afford a 2-3-4 week long preparatory course!or were pursuing one of a few very specific fields of mathematics! And you putting good in quotation marks strongly insinuates that you have no idea what a 140 on an IQ test means, which makes it absolutely impossible for you to have received it since it would have been explained to you! And ppl do tend to remember the equivalent of winning the olimpics, you know?
But I am sure that you received military training 40-50 years ago! Say, where and when did you receive it under whose preliminary command?
I’ve never taken any preparatory courses for anything and I’m not really good with mathematics, so no and no again.
And why I put the quotation marks around good is a reflection of my native language, we do that when one wishes to express their personal disbelief or doubt. I am well aware that the ~140 score is considered a good one by the designers of the test.
I served in the late 90’s and there have been several refresher courses but I’m not at the liberty to discuss any specifics of service matters publicly. If you have done military service you know this.
IQ tests went out of fashion mid 80-ties and they were only ever required in the very very top universities! There is no military academy in the world where you would have been asked for one!
140 is not a good a score! 140 is fucking legendary!!! Which would have been again explained to you if you ever achieved that, which again you would remember since its the equivalent of winning an olympic! But you don’t have a singular fucking clue what a 140 means on an IQ test… How very curious…
Ones military service starts at the end of their training, then you will be required to put your oaths down! Your bulshitting couldn’t even be chalked up as a semblance of protecting your anonymity! Graduation lists of military establishments are not public and even if they were there are 70-200-ish cadets in every year!
And soldiers can and do talk constantly about their service (ps thats how you can spot valor stealers on the internet, ppl like you :))! They are not allowed to talk of restricted info and missions! If you were a career secret sevice agent, you would not talk about being a soldier on the internet!
Another thing that makes absolutely no sense are the refresher courses and is a quite stupid attempt of weaseling out of the question! Most manuals were written in the 60-ties and have yet to be updated! And if you received new equipment you would not be sent back to uni! You would be taken to a field to practice with it!
Now tell me! Does your minsicular penis feel larger for lying and pretending to be a big man on the internet?
Full-scale cognitive batteries (sophisticated IQ tests) are great… for diagnostics. If someone has difficulties identifying the domains where the need extra help, accommodations. I order them all the time and they guide me on how to manage patients. The most telling thing about IQs is that I’ve never seen it in on a resume, not even mensa memberships.
But surely you are aware that companies are trying to sell it off as objectively measurement of int, successfully so since most of the population regards them so? This lil part is my issue!
of course. they do it because people are insecure.
Being interested in an objective measurement of your intellect? Silliest fucking thing I have ever heard!
The belief that an commercial IQ test is an “objective measure of your intellect” is a pretty good subjective measure of your intellect.
I am sorry, it is silly to think that in intelligence test measures intelligence
I agree. Its also super biased. I wouldn’t be surprised if it correlated with financial success in certain demographics in certain locations/communities, but like you say, it’s not an objective measure of intelligence.
So, you know how there’s a button on the top-left of your keyboard for ending sentences? Believe it or not, there’s also one on the bottom right as well! It looks like this: .
Perchance you should demonstrate it in your own sentences?
like this .
If you meant the dot(?) as a demonstrative then you yourself have not ended your sentence! If you meant the empty before the dot(?) as the demonstrative then you make no sense!
he abandonded his schooling once he got his visa, and did some shady sht to get his BROTHER one too. hes more or less just a richer version of trump, just slightly"smarter".
A failson that failed upwards
And the Understatement of the Year award goes to…
Seriously, when I first heard of this guy, I thought he must be smart. Then he started talking about things in my career field, and thought wow, that’s a stupid thing to say. The more he talked, the more I realised he’s a moron about nearly everything. Now I’m not convinced he can actually get dressed unassisted.
And yet executives in your career field probably would have nodded sagely, assuming that affinity to Musk would confer an appearance of intelligence to them, because they have no idea about the field either.
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
About the only consistent ability they have is to be complete sociopaths to screw over customers, employees, and shareholders alike. Which admittedly is a pretty powerful ability…
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
It’s the “Peter principle”:
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”: employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
Feel like I see a variant where they were never competent, and promoted based more on willingness to game the system than results.
For example, there was this guy who started about the same time as I did, and he was utterly useless. The team would largely endeavor to keep him away from anything important, but he’d still screw things up and cry for help and after saddling his mistake on someone who was going to stay after hours, he’d just leave and hope it got fixed. If the person sorted out his problem, he’d make a big deal about how hard his problem was and now it is resolved and how awesome it was for him to pull it off in spite of the headwinds.
Some years later, the person was in an executive position and the person that pretty much did all the work he was supposed to do had zero promotions. Most of us had learned our lesson and were content to let him thrash (his work wasn’t really important), but there was one guy that couldn’t stand to see work not happen successfully, and thanks to that he was able to get ahead.
The other thing has been that work never promotes from within, they always get some exterior hire that seems to have the qualifications more like ‘was a cool guy at the golf course’ or ‘son of a friend I owe a favor to’.
He definitely dresses himself !
I believe he chooses his own clothes, just not that he actually puts them on. It’s a bit amazing that he doesn’t wear the same Darth Vader costume every day like some toddlers insist upon doing.
He seems like the sort of idiot who could strangle himself trying to figure out how a shirt works, is what I’m saying.
My thoughts exactly! After that it was like a domino effect… I realized that probably everything this guy ever said and done was pure BS. Fake it until you make it.
A few years ago I watched a clip of Musk giving a tour of a sort of museum SpaceX has that shows the evolution of their rockets. At one point he was talking about how the more recent rockets had fewer “fiddly bits” on the outside.
This is such a burn! “Abramson noted, “It is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them.”
Presumably his companies must just run themselves, because we seem to be expected to believe that he’s running a rocket ship company, an electric car company, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, moon-lighting as the de facto President of the United States, while also dicking around on Twitter all day long and being one of the world’s #1 gamers and parenting like 15 children or whatever it’s supposed to be now. (Or at least, the ones that are still talking to him I guess.)
Those are probably corollaries to Worthington’s Law. “He makes more money than you do!”
For many evangelicals, they also associate wealth with divine blessing.
Also any sort of success.
If you’re chronically ill or have family problems or are poor, you must have done something to deserve it, because god will reward the worthy. Makes it really easy to be bigoted.
While I agree with the premise of the book, everyone who has met/worked with/knows Seth Abramson all day what a piece of shit grifter hack he is, so I don’t know how much confidence I have in the book overall.
I do not doubt that evidence to support this assertion exists, but Abramson is always chasing the next big thing and bitches about how no one likes him on bsky like an angsty teenager. He’s just cringe.
I was actually kinda interested in the upcoming book… Can anyone else confirm if his work is garbage? I’m not super familiar with him.
I mean, he is using his position to gain wealth and power. Im sure he didnt get there by being stupid. No, hes not some Tony Stark level engineer and his intellectual and engineering achievements are nothing of note. Hes really good at swindling people and getting a large proportion of the population to like him, that takes some talent.
Survivorship bias.
You don’t hear about all the Elons who made a bad bet with the money from their dad’s apartheid emerald mine, and ended up living meager multi-millionaire lives instead.
This. A million times this! For so many things in life. So many persons fail to get this. Entrepreneurs, billionaires, success-stories.
Succeeding doesn’t mean you made the right decision with the information you had; it means you made the right decision now that we know the outcome.
yes. and it doesn’t matter. donald trump is a moron, but he’s evil, and has failed upward to be president of the united states twice, first time a million americans died due to a purposefully inept covid response, this second time, he’s going to beat that number by ordinates. everyone so fixated on how smart or accomplished these nazis are, it does not matter. This is a way for everyone to feel better that they’re smarter, or know sooooo many people that are smarter. If we were smarter, they wouldn’t keep fucking beating, and killing us. IQ means nothing, it’s what you can leverage with what you have individually or within or at the forefront of a group that does. And these Nazi fucks know how to do that.
Yes, they have a particular narrow cleverness about how to abuse people and systems for their own gain. Since fascists only care about power, pointing out that they are dumb, hypocritical or inconsistent doesn’t achieve anything. All they see is that you’re keeping yourself busy talking while they load their guns and prepare the camps. The only way to fight fascism is to actually fight it.
Elonis a highly productive con man. He fooled me when I bought the FSD option on my Tesla in 2019 for $8k. When I sold it, the market only was willing to pay $1500.
Congrats on getting out of the abusive relationship, but may I ask why you believed him in 2019 when it was clear he had been lying and promising FSD for nearly a decade at that point? Were you just not following the news all that closely and took his word at face value? Or was the promise, if it came true, just so tantalizing that you turned a blind eye to the turmoil surrounding Musk? Thanks in advance, I love learning about peoples’ thought processes after they have realized they made a mistake.
It’s giving Oblivion NPC lmao
Not trying to be an ass, but do you have a link to that tweet?
The ass is the one who posts screenshots of a website without linking to it. Especially if its a screenshot of text
We don’t need to link to X.
We need to link to all sources. If the source is malicious, replace the dots with [.]
No. We don’t. We don’t need to feed X.
Want to know the souce? Google “musk x ‘you have committed a crime’” and it’s the top return.
Not hard at all. Don’t feed that troll site.
Not op, but here you go: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
Just add “cancel” after x for a Nitter link.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
I’m pretty sure there’s no evidence that the soup between his ears qualifies as a human brain, but yet- here we are, allowing him and his term of incel lackeys full and unfettered access to all of America’s finances.
I always knew America would somehow end embarrassingly. I just had no idea it would be this shameful.
I mean I can make the same claim but at least one of his college degrees seems to be valid
College degrees are a dime a dozen.
I have two stem degrees and I am of average intelligence. At the very least, having a degree doesn’t make you a “super genius” like the MAGAt cult believes
Going to college makes you a brainwashed lib, but also going to college makes you a genius.
Whichever one is convenient at the time.
Kind of like the answers to “What is DOGE?” and “What is Lon Musk’s role in the government?” - the answer is whatever is convenient at the moment.
A degree is still some form of an intellectual achievement. Im not saying Musk is smart Im saying a degree represents an achievement.
A college degree just means you could afford the time and money to stick around until an institution gives it to you.
Unless you are a celebrity, then some glory seeking institution will just give you an “honorary” degree.
College can be an enriching experience, but the degree itself doesn’t prove you actually availed yourself of that enrichment or proved your capabilities.
I would still argue that a degree demonstrates a level of intellectual achievement. It’s not super impressive to have a bs in macro but it is an achievement nonetheless.
I think it means more for a lower class/middle class person, where it really takes dedication and resourcefulness to get through such a program.
For upper class, you can get that degree regardless.
I disagree, it is considerably less impressive when he was born with an emerald spoon in his mouth. It’s hard to do anything other than fail upwards when you’ve never gone without food, shelter, or basic necessities.
Donald Trump, great example of this. He’s got a degree in economics. Do I really need to demonstrate how worthless his degree was? Are you really going to call it an intellectual achievement?
Im not saying it is impressive but unless we redefined “achievement” a degree counts as one.
