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.
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.
He definitely dresses himself !
Ahh, i loved reading this. like blam on a sunburn. cold water on a hot day.
I think i discovered i have a kink for people shit-talking about tech CEOs.
Blam!
Blam-o!
That is because everything Elmo says and has said is a lie.
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.
Personally, I don’t blame anyone being fooled. He has an army of social media cultists obfuscating reality for him without him even asking. It’s hard to see the truth when it’s drowned out by religious doctrine.
When is the biography coming out?
Also, when is that HBO documentary on fElon coming out?
I know you have but what did I do?
Not trying to be an ass, but do you have a link to that tweet?
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
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.
Oh! Haha now I know who you are talking about. Yes he is very… Intense on Bluesky. I must say I understand. Living in this world is like taking crazy pills and I can understand “just reciting reality out loud for as many people to see” as a coping mechanism.
Didn’t one of Trump’s professors call him one of the dumbest students he ever had?
In that light, these two are perfect for each other.
I’ve met a couple people who’ve met Trump, and let’s just say “He’s the dumbest person I’ve ever met” is the default opinion of him.
Man this book will probably be banned before it comes out
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.”
For many evangelicals, they also associate wealth with divine blessing.
Also any sort of success.
If you’re chronically ill or have family problems, you must have done something to deserve it, because god will reward the worthy. Makes it really easy to be bigoted.
Those are probably corollaries to Worthington’s Law. “He makes more money than you do!”
tell us something we don’t know
Imagine being as stupid as this clown is and his vice president and still… STILL somehow being smarter than the average voter. The bar is on the ground, folks.
If it makes it any better id argue that the average voter at least has the excuse of being propagandized and under educated with minimal ability to improve. These fucks have more than enough money to inprove themselves nearly infinitely but would rather wallow in their egos and call it wisdom.
I feel like if ya sat down with Cletus the Appalachian hillbilly and told him the tale of his names origin he would probably find it interesting at the very least.
with minimal ability to improve.
This is the part I’m still trying to wrap my head around. In the US, almost everyone with a pulse has internet access, and websites like Wikipedia are not blocked or filtered. Obviously you’re right because there are a lot of misinformed people, I just don’t understand how people let that happen to themselves.
The ability to improve oneself consciously requires the acknowledgment and will to do so those are both just as important. Thats not even getting into the mental health crises which adds its own problems and even more roadblocks. Imagine if you will a 30 year old man working a shitty job in a loading dock in rural Idaho the pay is shit the work is hard and when that dude finally gets home after 12 hours of work do you really think he will want to watch PBS eons or do you think he will watch Rust videos and pass out?
I may find that relaxing but even ill admit it that there is an appeal to mindless entertainment. Now consider the fact that this by itself has been going on for at least fourty years and thats not even getting into religious and political indoctrination. If theres one way to describe Americans as a whole its that we are broken.
I suspect that plenty of folks are hoping everything collapses simply because then theyd be able to get a fucking break even if it is only in death.
I don’t remember the quote exactly but.
“It’s just so dumb” “So dumb it’s genius” “No it’s just dumb”
perfectly encapsulates musk.
From glass onion lol. Great movie, btw.
Janelle Monae crushes it in her role. I mean absolutely crushes it. In it she is acting in the role of a character acting in a role, which is actually really hard to do in a really satisfying way, and she absolutely pulls it off. What’s more is that she lets the veil slip just enough, as an actress, for the character playing the role to be believable as an actress. Like her music and visual artistry as an R&B performer is incredible, but there’s still a part of me that feels like the world lost something from her not going into acting. But if she had, she’d probably have put out an album that would make me lament she hadn’t focused on R&B.
They should make the story of Trump’s life but have Lisa Llampanelli play Trump.
Nah, I thought that quote from the film summarized it quite well…
Miles Bron --> Mr Elon is B?
Yes, he was intended to be a fictional stand-in for the muskrat.
I want it to be an anagram, since it has Elon in it. Never figured out a great one.
Elon’s brim? Mr Elon sib?
Born slime.
Bin morsel.
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.
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! Before we found out its bs!
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: .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I can agree with most of this. Capitalism, and society in general, banked rather hard on Galileo’s old saying,
“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable that which is not so.”
They took that to mean, "Give every facet of everything an objective measure in order to determine how make imaginary lines go up so imaginary numbers in our bank accounts go up.
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Well said.
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!
And what if I called a rose a stinkweed?
I think it’s a completely valid criticism, and I agree with the critism.
I just think semantic hang-ups are really… Exhausting and of minimal value. Terrible ratio.
Extend the principle of charity, hurdle it, then get to the meat.
My issue is not with its name!
The companies still are trying to sell IQ test off as objective measurement of intelligence and overwhelming measurement of the population believes it to be so!
I don’t know if it’s fully BS. It’s just another data point to add for the ahhkkksshhualllyy crowd imo. But pattern recognition I think has high importance in actual intelligence.
If I were to sell you a medicine that helps with mild headaches as an all healing magical remedy would you call it bs?
I’d call it great for headaches and not great for anything else.
I wouldn’t call it bs because it works great for headaches. I’d call the claim that it works for everything as bs.
…
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Yes, thank you!
What you want to bet he had someone else take the test for him lol? Judging by how he plays games and all, it seems to be his m.o….
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.
If we were smarter, they wouldn’t keep fucking beating
Well, the problem is that there are a whole lot of stupid people that are easily convinced to vote for people like this, even if our side believes in putting smart, experienced, educated people into power.
So, even if we are smarter, we are outvoted by a lot of very stupid people (in some instances - in other instances, it’s because of extreme gerrymandering and “gifts” like the Electoral College, so even if we get a majority of people to make the sane choice, we still end up losing ).
Lastly, the weasel apparatchiks on their side have found ways to peel off voters with things like Gaza and the fact that Democrats have not given them a pretty pony, too.
