Elon Musk IQ and a few other facts about Elon you don't know

On January 7, 2021, Elon Musk overtook Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person. A 6% rise in Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) share within the same week lifted the CEO’s stock holdings and stock options by $10 billion. As of press time, Musk’s total net worth was $209 billion, according to Bloomberg’s real-time billionaire tracker. Bezos, on the other hand, is currently sitting $23 billion below with a net worth of $186 billion.

That being said, there is no questioning Musk’s intelligence and prowess as a successful businessman. The CEO has several success stories tied to his name; from Zip2 to PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX. More recently he earned the title of a “real-life iron man.”

In this article, I am going to run through everything (or at least most things) you need to know about Musk – from his IQ to his personality, business, lifestyle, investments, and dare-devil innovations.

Without further ado, let’s get it on…

IQ of Elon MuskThe truth is that no official data confirms the IQ of Musk. However, it is estimated to be around 155. For some context, the IQ of most people falls in the range of 85 to 115, with the average being 100. Over 95% of the world’s population is below 130 while the IQ of notable brains such as Hawking and Einstein is around 160.

But there is no reason to feel sad if you have done your IQ test and it falls below 100. In an actual sense, an IQ test comprises of a series of psychological tests that assess your cognitive abilities. A high IQ is no guarantee of success, and neither is a low IQ a guarantee of failure.

So, what was it exactly for Elon Musk? Was it a high IQ or were there other factors at play?

Read on to find out more.

How it all started?According to the New York Times, Elon Musk is “the most successful and [most] important entrepreneur in the world.” He is many things in his space exploration company, Space X. He is the founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer. He is the CEO of Tesla, Inc. He is also the founder of The Boring Company, Solar City, and the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI.

As a testament to his success, Musk is the only entrepreneur who has managed to build four billion-dollar companies. They include PayPal, Tesla, Space X, and Solar City. But this wasn’t always the case.

Born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, Elon Reeve Musk is the first child of an engineering father and a model/nutritionist mother. He began schooling at the Waterkloof House Preparatory and by the age of 9, his parents divorced. Musk chose to live with his father.

Legend has it that Musk was bullied as a young child. At one time, he was thrown down a flight of stairs. This was not enough to stop him though. Instead, it pushed him closer to his books. He had a voracious appetite for reading and by the age of eight, Musk had read all the books in his local library, including the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. He also had a thing or two for computers and technology. Before turning 13, young Musk was already writing computer software. He coded and sold his first game called Blastar at the age of 12 for $500.

Describing Musk, his brother Kimbal Musk called him a guy with unlimited ambition. Kimbal said:

It’s not a typical type of ambition. His mind just needs to be constantly fulfilled, and the problems that he takes on therefore need to be more and more complex over time in order to keep him interested.

Meanwhile, in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Musk affirmed that he was a curious and smart kid who needed little to no supervision. According to him:

I just had a housekeeper who was there to make sure I didn’t break anything. She wasn’t, like, watching me. I was off making explosives and reading books and building rockets and doing things that could have gotten me killed. I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.

There is no questioning of Musk’s high IQ. From an early age, he started displaying the signs of a genius. By 17, Musk was already in the university. He bagged two bachelor’s degrees – in physics and economics. After college, he got a scholarship to do his Ph.D. in Energy Physics at Stanford. But guess what? Musk dropped out after 2 days in favor of starting a business.

Along with his brother Kimbal, the duo set out to form a company called Global Link Information Network which was later renamed Zip2. This was in the early–mid 90s and no one was really interested in the internet. They, however, got their big break in 1996 following a $3 million investment from venture capital firm, Mohr Davidow Ventures. Musk was eventually removed as a CEO from his own company and in 1999; Zip2 was sold to Compaq for $307 million. Musk got a whopping $22 million from the sale and this was all he needed to experiment even the more. He went on to found PayPal (originally X.com), became the CEO of Tesla, and the rest like they say is history.

Elon Musk HouseIt may surprise you to know that Musk is actually planning on becoming homeless. If you follow the entrepreneur on social media, you might have discovered that he is quite audacious.

In May 2020, he tweeted that he was “selling almost all [of his] physical possessions” to seek “freedom.” And true to his rather bold promise, Musk started selling his houses.