By Terry Manning
There are few things I like better than watching know-it-alls get taken down a peg or two.
Some of you might be thinking, don’t talk yourself into a reckoning, smart guy. Except I appreciate being corrected. First, the Bible says only a fool scorns wisdom, and second, I hate the idea of walking around being confidently wrong.
This differs from public pundits like Nate Silver, the political analyst who’s drawn pushback recently over his adherence to the Great Man Theory of history. This theory proposes that the track of human history can best be studied as a series of breakthroughs achieved by great men.
In this case, Silver was heralding the accomplishments of tech billionaire and presidential puppeteer Elon Musk after a Musk biographer stated, point-blank, that Musk was intelligent but possessed nowhere near a genius-level IQ.
“I would peg his IQ as between 100 and 110,” writer/political historian Seth Ambramson wrote on X. “There’s zero evidence in his biography of anything higher.” For the record, that would make Musk an above-average thinker, nothing to turn up one’s nose at, but well short of the 130 or better IQ usually associated with being a genius.
Silver replied, “How can you be a remotely competent historian without recognizing that major events in human history are shaped by high IQ, high-agency people who are bad and/or flawed and/or dangerous … The much better take is that high IQs serve as a force multiplier for both positive and negative traits.”
That’s interesting. Silver asserts Musk is so smart it “multiplies” the worst aspects of his personality. But of course, there are plenty of people for whom intelligence is a reason why they are civic-minded and understand that when everyone prospers, every. One. Prospers.
Another take, one I have considered, could be Musk being on the autistic spectrum. Musk disclosed he had Asperger’s syndrome during his stint hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live in 2021.
“Look, I know I sometimes post and say strange things. That’s just how my brain works. To anyone I offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”
“Chill” and “normal” were not words I thought of then about Musk, and they are certainly not words I think of now.
One well-known sign of autism is difficulty recognizing social cues. Cues such as, I don’t know, recognizing that firing half the federal government workforce could result in devastation on macro- and microeconomic scales.
Of course, not all people who have autism, or are anywhere on the spectrum, are malevolent or nonchalant about the harm they cause to others, but to borrow Musk’s own words, that’s how his brain works.
Another take, one I wish more people would explore, is the effect on Musk of the rich man’s flu. No, not influenza: Affluenza.
The term came into prominence in 2013 when Ethan Couch, a 16-year-old from Dallas, Texas, plowed into a group trying to help a young woman with her broken-down car. Four people on the ground were killed, and a passenger in the bed of Couch’s pickup truck was paralyzed.
Couch tested for a blood alcohol level of 0.24 (three times the legal limit), with subsequent blood work showing he had marijuana and prescription medications in his system as well.
For the carnage he caused, Couch was sentenced to 10 years … probation? Yes, and his lawyers’ defense? Couch was too rich and too spoiled to know the difference between right and wrong.
The term resurfaced a few years later when former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner was convicted of raping an unconscious woman. He got six months in jail, a sentence that drew widespread criticism of the judge for being too lenient after he said Turner didn’t deserve to have his life ruined for “twenty minutes of action.”
I wonder how many people are around today because of 20 minutes (or less) of action. But that’s a poor people’s problem to someone like Musk. When you’re rich and as smart as he and many others think he is, you’re doing the world a favor by having babies, whether or not they are wanted by the mothers.
None of Elon Musk’s primary traits make him a bad guy. Following on from a thought I had a couple of weeks ago, this is what they call correlation, not causation. But Musk is flawed, have no doubt.
And you have to wonder what kind of broken person would put this broken man in a position to break the country. The same kind of broken person who would populate their council of closest advisors with other broken, ill-intentioned people.
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a break from all of them.
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
