This segues to a debate about Elon Musk’s IQ , in which some took issue with my claim that although his IQ is likely nominally high, he’s not among the smartest people in the world, a position likely occupied by top pure mathematicians and theoretical physicists. People are apt to overestimate Elon Musk’s IQ owing to his business acumen, wealth, and the ‘halo effect’ of having started many successful ventures (even though these are not statistically independent events, and earlier successes beget later successes). But these are not highly g-loaded, so they are not reliable predictors of IQ.
IQ tests and the SATs have a verbal and quantitative reasoning sections, but not a ‘business acumen section’ or a ‘wealth section’ (although a common critcism is that the SATs are implicitly biased in favor of wealthy people). Perfect scores on the notoriously hard ‘analogies section’ of the SATs were very rare, until it was removed in 2005, to the relief of many future test-takers.
It also helps that rich people tend to be competent. Save for inherited wealth or other windfall or luck, one typically cannot become rich without being good at one’s trade or vocation. But competence is not the same as intelligence, and the two are often conflated. Intelligence is about the ability to make inferences and to reason in a general sense at a moment’s notice, without preparation or acclimatization, but competence is more domain-specific and focused over longer periods of time. Competent people are good at their craft, and this competence helps convey or project the illusion or aura of high intelligence to outsiders (“If someone is so successful, rich, or good, they must be really smart too!”), but intelligence is more like surgical precision or accuracy at something which is inherently hard to begin with, not expertise per se.
To wit, about high intelligence being rarer than wealth, there are 24 million millionaires in the U.S.–about 1/10 of the adult population–which is still five times more common than meeting the 132 IQ cutoff for Mensa. So this means being outwardly successful and competent–as enjoying a high standard of living and a good career–is hardly any assurance of also being smart.