For months, an internet-wide guessing game has swirled around the question of where Elon Musk’s intelligence falls on the bell curve. President Trump has called Musk a “seriously high I.Q. individual.” Musk’s onetime biographer Seth Abramson wrote on X that he would “peg his I.Q. as between 100 and 110,” and claimed that there was “zero evidence in his biography for anything higher.” The economics commentator Noah Smith estimated Musk’s I.Q. at more than 130, a number gleaned from his reported SAT score. A circulating screenshot shows Fox News has pegged the number at 155, citing Sociosite, a junk website. The pollster Nate Silver guessed that Musk is “probably even a ‘genius,’” and theorized that he may not always appear that way because, as he put it on X, “high I.Q.s serve as a force multiplier for both positive and negative traits.”

When we speculate about Musk’s I.Q., what are we really talking about?

Not his score on an intelligence test; if he has ever taken such a test, its results have not been made public. His “I.Q.” is instead extrapolated from his success, his wealth, his biography and his personal presentation. Assigning him a high number serves to explain his vertiginous rise in the technology industry and, now, the government. The reasoning circles around and around. He has money and power, so he must be smart; he has a lot of money and power, so he must be very smart.

When Trump posed with Musk outside the White House in March, a makeshift Tesla dealership assembled on the lawn, the president implored Americans to buy the cars and secure the relationship between Musk’s intelligence and his success. “We have to take care of our high I.Q. people,” he said, “because we don’t have too many of them.”

For more than a century, psychologists have debated the extent to which an I.Q. test is capable of measuring a person’s inherent intellect (and if such a thing even exists). Now, “I.Q.” has been uncoupled from the test itself and loosed in the discourse to lend a scientific sheen to the consolidation of a new political elite.

I.Q. is the term of choice for the man who doesn’t just think he’s smart, but thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. Americans have long been obsessed with I.Q., and the human rankings it facilitates, but rarely is that fixation stated so plainly, so incessantly, and at such high levels. To some of our most powerful people, I.Q. has come to stand in as the totalizing measure of a person — and a justification for the power that they claim.

Trump has spent much of his second term sorting humans into “low I.Q. individuals” (Kamala Harris, Representative Al Green) and “high I.Q. individuals” (cryptocurrency boosters, Musk, Musk’s 4-year-old son).