Silicon Valley billionaires remain in thrall to the cult of the geek

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At an FT event a few years ago, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was asked what painful lessons he had learned building his software company. His answer startled audiences then and is all the more resonant today.

Gates replied that in his early twenties he was convinced that “IQ was fungible” and that he was wrong. His goal had been to hire the smartest people he could find and build a corporate “IQ hierarchy” with the most intelligent employees at the top. His assumption was that no one would want to work for a boss who was no smarter than them. “Well, it didn’t work for very long,” he admitted. “At the age of 25, I knew that IQ seems to come in different forms.”

Those employees who understood sales and management, for example, appeared to be smart in ways that were negatively correlated with writing good code or mastering physics equations, Gates said. Microsoft has since worked to blend different types of intelligence to create effective teams. It seems to have paid off: the company now boasts a market capitalization of more than $3tn and will celebrate its 50th birthday next year.

Gates may have learned that lesson early. But while many of his fellow US tech billionaires share his initial instinct about the primacy of IQ, few seem to have reached his later conclusion. There is a tech titan tendency to believe that it is their own special kind of intelligence that has enabled them to become wildly successful and insanely wealthy and to champion that in others.

Moreover, they seem to believe that this superior intelligence is always and everywhere applicable.

The default assumption for successful founders seems to be that their expertise in building tech companies gives them equally valuable insight into the US federal budget deficit, pandemic responses or the war in Ukraine. To them, fresh information gleaned from unknown realms sometimes looks like God-given revelation, even though it is common knowledge to everyone outside their bubble. A young American tech billionaire, a college dropout who had just returned from a trip to Paris, once asked me with wide-eyed wonder if I had heard of the French Revolution. It was apparently unbelievable.

This inevitably leads to questions about the fungibility of Elon Musk’s IQ given his omnipresence in the American economy and now politics. The South African-born entrepreneur is blessed with an exceptional kind of intelligence and clairvoyance that commands respect even from his fiercest competitors. “I think he’s a goddamn legend,” the CEO of a rival electric car company told me, though he was personally appalled by the ways in which Musk had used his social media company X as a propaganda tool.

Although Musk excels at building cool cars and rocket ships, his personal brand extension into social media has floundered, and he’s facing a user and advertiser exodus at X. Yet Musk used the $44 billion megaphone he bought to help electing Donald Trump. In turn, the future US president has now invited the “super genius” Musk to become one of two co-heads of the planned Ministry of Government Efficiency.

To cut red tape, Musk advertises “super high IQ, small government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours a week on unlovely cost cutting”. Musk has already said he would like to shut down three-quarters of the federal government’s 400 departments. “99 is enough,” he wrote.

These days, Musk prefers trolling Gates rather than listening to him. Yet he may still be reflecting on Gates’ painful lesson: The smartest people in one field don’t always have the best ideas in others.

There is undoubtedly massive bureaucratic waste to be cut, but it will take many different types of intelligence to understand all the public benefits, competing agendas and conflicting interests around public spending.

There is also some irony in tech billionaires trumpeting superior human intelligence when they are also developing AI that may one day overtake it. Google co-founder Larry Page branded Musk a “speciesist” for defending human intelligence so stubbornly in the face of advanced technology.

Musk is of course working on a solution: he plans to upgrade our biological wetware using electronic brain implants developed by his company Neuralink to fuse human and machine intelligence.

That prospect will frighten many, but in another way may prove the ultimate test of whether human IQ is fungible.

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