Anyone who follows Elon Musk closely knows that he regularly says and—far more often—posts things that can be fairly called “dumb.” The richest man in the world is also a veritable fountain of deranged conspiracy theories, bizarrely offensive claims about history, strange lies about himself (including easily-debunked ones about being a world-class gamer, of all things), and noxious, antisocial sentiments of every sort.
The dumbness of Musk’s recent online speech should be beyond dispute at this point, even to his defenders. One popular YouTuber recently looked into Musk’s X output and noted that he amplified six false claims—several of them incredibly dumb—in a single 24-hour period. This isn’t a new problem. As a New York Times investigation from September found, about a third of Musk’s tweets over the course of a week contained false information, including claims about a bomb being found outside a Donald Trump rally (there was no bomb), Democrats seeking to make memes illegal (… no?), and a conspiracy theory about Democrats favoring open borders so that illegal immigrants could flood in and vote for them in the November election (I guess they weren’t able to sneak quite enough of them over the border in time).
Musk also frequently exhibits a deficit of social intelligence and empathy, spewing vitriol that brings negative attention upon himself and his companies. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” he tweeted at a skeptic of H1-B visas in late December. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” Or take his response to a relatively anodyne tweet by Sen. Mark Kelly about Ukraine’s need for military support: “You are a traitor.” That’s an asinine statement no matter your thoughts on the proper level of U.S. support for Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia, even more so in light of Kelly’s quarter-century of military service.
Musk has openly discussed being on the autism spectrum, and some have speculated that this is connected to some of his more colorful outbursts. This is a misguided, if not offensive, explanation. Yes, individuals with severe forms of (what is now called) autism spectrum disorder can have behavioral problems, but Musk is the richest man in the world, leads multiple giant companies, and once hosted Saturday Night Live. The idea that he can’t control himself just doesn’t line up with the available facts. If that is the case, why is he anywhere near the White House?
I’ve been regrettably online in recent months, and sometimes, I’ve called Musk dumb. The result is typically exchanges that go something like this:
Me, screenshotting or quote-retweeting Musk claiming that, like, migrants stole all the eggs to use in jihadist rituals: Holy crap how could he be so dumb?
Random Musk Fan 1: lol yes he’s dumb that’s why he’s the richest man in the world
RMF2: oh cool—hey, remind me the last time YOU built a rocket
RMF3: Why don’t *you* save the government billions of dollars, if you’re so confident you could do a better job?
These replies made me realize that I was using the term “dumb” in a way that Musk’s fans thought was, well, stupid. And then, as outrage over Musk and general DOGE discourse was reaching a fever pitch, the popular columnist Noah Smith (who is not dumb) weighed in on his Substack, arguing that “Elon Musk is, in many important ways, the single most capable man in America, and we deny that fact at our peril.”
In the same piece, he wrote:
Part of the reason some progressives still insist on sneering at Elon’s intellect is the traditional class resentment of the shabby educated elite for the wealthy titans of industry. But I think a lot more of it is simply what the kids call “cope.” Right now, Elon is applying all of the same talents he used to build his companies—motivating employees, circumventing red tape, identifying and overwhelming every bottleneck at breakneck speed—to his effort to remake the U.S. civil service with DOGE. Telling themselves that Elon doesn’t really have any talent, or that he just gets lucky, or that he’s just a huckster, or that he only succeeds because of government help, are ways that progressives comfort themselves with the belief that Elon’s efforts will inevitably fail.
Built into the “applying all of the same talents” language is the assumption that those talents are transferable. And that’s the whole problem here—and the reason simply arguing about whether Elon Musk is “smart” or “dumb” misses the point. Really, this is a matter of character, a matter of what qualities we want in the personalities of the powerful individuals who make choices that affect millions of people. And Musk, who seems to truly believe he knows everything and can solve every problem through the sheer force of his intellect and his online bluster, is sorely lacking in that department.
Social and behavioral scientists have been attempting to quantify human potential and performance for more than a century, and the effort has boiled down to answering one question: Can you give someone a relatively brief test that will reliably predict their ability to perform well in certain settings?
The short answer is yes—but again, in certain settings. IQ tests, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (otherwise known as the SAT), and their various cousins have been shown, repeatedly and conclusively, to correlate reasonably well with certain types of academic and professional performance.
“Reasonably well” doesn’t mean “with perfect accuracy.” In general, kids who rank in the 99th percentile of SAT scores will be able to successfully tackle high-level undergraduate work, and in general, kids in the 40th percentile won’t. Contrary to a depressing quantity of progressive science denialism on the subject, these are among the best tools we have available for the task of gauging potential. But critics of these tests are correct to point out that they offer only limited insights into an individual, and are far from bulletproof tools for predicting success. Your SAT score, for example, is not going to tell anyone much about your odds of becoming a successful dancer, musician, chef, or professional athlete.
In short, mainstream intelligence tests measure things like one’s vocabulary, mental ability to rotate shapes, and skill at identifying patterns in a series of numbers. They don’t measure character, and they don’t measure one of the most important traits a powerful person can possess: an ability to know what he or she doesn’t know, and to act accordingly. Say what you will of Donald Rumsfeld, the distinction between “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” is quite useful.
Plenty of otherwise smart people lack this sort of epistemic humility. Noah Smith noted that, according to Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson, the tech mogul scored a 1400 on the SAT in the late 1980s, which would roughly translate to an IQ in the mid-130s or so—impressive, albeit not genius-level.
But, again, these scores say nothing about Musk’s character. If there were an aptitude test for epistemic humility—and I’m not aware of any—I’m confident Musk would score quite poorly. And that can explain why the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been a complete, unmitigated, embarrassing disaster for both him and the Trump administration—and not just from the perspective of liberals and moderate conservatives aghast at its chainsaw approach to gutting the federal bureaucracy. Musk’s efforts, a recent New York Times article explains, “have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.” Among the aggrieved is Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the Times article was pegged to an “explosive” recent meeting between the two men and President Trump.
This was just the latest in a growing pile of humiliations for DOGE—humiliations that started almost immediately after Musk set up shop in Washington. There have already been multiple instances in which DOGE swiftly fired groups of federal employees, only for the Trump administration to backpedal and rehire them after realizing that hey, maybe we actually need nuclear safety workers, scientists fighting an ongoing bird flu outbreak, and veterans operating crisis hotlines for other veterans. (“Efficient,” this was not.)
DOGE is tallying its supposed savings, meanwhile, on a website that has been one blunder after another: a monthslong string of lies, misunderstandings (it’s often hard to know which), corrections—and, finally, outright obfuscations. Sometimes DOGE announces “savings” from long-ago-completed government contracts, and in at least one instance, its estimated reductions were off by three orders of magnitude: DOGE announced it was cutting an $8 billion Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contract that was actually worth $8 million. That mostly fake $8 billion accounted for half of DOGE’s entire initially announced savings of $16 billion. (The error was eventually fixed on the website, though multiple outlets were unable to get a comment from the group about the change.) If DOGE were a math student, it would have flunked ninth-grade algebra.
Some DOGE cuts are astonishingly counterproductive, as seemingly no one on Musk’s team understands that some government programs generate revenue. If, for example, DOGE is able to lay off its planned total of 18,200 Internal Revenue Service employees, underenforcement of tax policy could lead to $159 billion in lost government revenue over the next decade, according to an estimate from the Budget Lab at Yale University—and that’s a net estimate that factors in the $17.2 billion that will be saved over this period by letting go of these workers. Even if you assume this estimate is wildly off in both directions, that Yale is overestimating the cost and underestimating the savings, the math just doesn’t work for DOGE—not even close. How are layoffs that will cause 12-figure hits to government revenue compatible with the mission of “government efficiency” and cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse”? Some of the workers in question investigate tax fraud and abuse!
All of DOGE’s troubles arguably stem from the same place: Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s inability to know what they don’t know. When Reuters asked Trump last year whether he would be open to giving Musk some sort of advisory role in his administration, the Republican nominee said yes. “He’s a very smart guy,” Trump responded. “I certainly would, if he would do it, I certainly would. He’s a brilliant guy.” Clearly, Trump’s belief in Musk as a “smart guy” led him to think his skills would translate to the public sector. Musk himself clearly agreed, under the impression that he could treat government itself like one of his many startups, despite the fact that the differences between the two worlds are blazingly obvious. “Elon Musk believes that his expertise in building innovative technology-based businesses also provides the expertise to redesign the federal budget,” Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, told me in an email. “It does not.”
Riedl headed up budgetary and spending policy for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and designed a 10-year deficit-reduction plan for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. If anyone shares Musk’s ostensible goals, it’s her. And yet she had nothing but criticism for DOGE’s government-as-startup approach. “Not only is the federal budget extraordinarily complex—the aggregation of 10,000 different programs and accounts covering wildly different functions—but it is also accountable to appropriations laws, elected lawmakers, and voters whose interests go beyond bottom-line cost cutting,” she continued in her email. “After all, if Tesla or X fall apart, consumers can go to Ford or Bluesky. But if Social Security checks stop going out, there is no other office to pay out those vital benefits.”
As soon as Elon Musk wandered into this new area, which is in many ways far more complicated than any of his prior endeavors, he came across like an overconfident child. Even his early promise, that he would cut $2 trillion from the budget in a single year (later downgraded to $1 trillion), betrayed astonishing ignorance of the basic contours of the issue, like a basketball neophyte going on ESPN and predicting Victor Wembanyama will average 60 points per game next season.
That’s how we’ve arrived at where we are: Elon Musk doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and doesn’t show any interest in wanting to know what he doesn’t know. He didn’t see the need to bring in any actual experts who could explain the intricacies of federal budgeting to him. You can only make mistakes as obvious as announcing an $8 billion cut to an agency whose entire budget is $8.7 billion if no one on your team has any clue what they’re doing.
This choice not to integrate subject-area expertise into DOGE’s efforts—and it was a choice—doesn’t have much to do with IQ, per se. Sure, someone with a higher IQ is probably more likely, on average, to understand their own limitations, but this is really an issue of character, which is something IQ can’t measure. Elon Musk, like many other extremely rich and powerful individuals, lacks one iota of humility, and he thinks he can simply Elon his way through wicked problems that vex even the greatest minds in the world. (And no, Musk’s brief and superficial admission that DOGE “will make mistakes” and “won’t be perfect” does not count as genuine reflection, especially given that in the same breath, he reiterated the $1 trillion target for first-year cuts.)
DOGE is causing so much needless chaos and grievously unnecessary suffering that it’s difficult to reflect on the “lessons” or “morals” of the story at the moment—it’s more urgent to simply document what’s going on and who is being victimized. In the long run, though, Musk’s effort will serve as an important and peppery business-school case study on overconfidence and character—a case study in which Musk comes across not as a towering titan of industry blessing the federal government with his capacious talents, but rather as a fundamentally small man profoundly out of his depth.
