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Fair enough. I'll concede that he's probably top 1% intelligence which puts him in the top 80 million smartest people in the world.
But Terrance Tao he is not.
Interesting side question. Are there any tycoons from history who are legit 175 IQ type outliers?
Jeff Bezos was at DE Shaw before he founded Amazon, and was successful there. DE Shaw are like Jane Street in that they recruit primarily for raw IQ and can afford to be extremely selective on it. 146 IQ (top 0.1%) doesn't cut it. 155 IQ (top 0.01%) probably does. Top 0.01% is also around the level where other smart people start using the word "genius" to describe you.
175 IQ is 1 in 3 million, and even the people who care about ultra-high IQs think that the distinction between very smart and very, very smart ceases to matter around the 1 in 1 million point. Re. the various comments on high SAT scores, the Prometheus Society considers 1560 on the old SAT to be 1 in 30,000 which corresponds to a 160 IQ on the current standard scale. There are no longer any publically available IQ tests which are accurate at that level.
SBF was above-average IQ for Jane Street, which also qualifies him as a legit genius.
If we treat "implausible polymathic success in a wide range of IQ-loaded fields" as a sign of genius-level IQ, then Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon are probably the smartest world leaders in history.
I really doubt either DE Shaw or Jane Street average 99.99th percentile intelligence for juniors. Their testing (any testing) isn’t that granular.
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Bill gates is the obvious one. I’d probably point to John mcafee as the mentally ill version of the same thing, maybe some of the enron people, possibly Thomas Edison. Deeper in history you get into ‘who is a tycoon, really’, but the wealthiest men in history are I think Mansa musa and Francisco Pizarro, neither of whom seem likely to be geniuses. John Rockefeller strikes me as probably the smartest of the original robber barons, but probably not to genius level.
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Only a handful who have extremely impressive academic performance, like Gates. Even for those who do, it's questionable - Zuck wasn't a highly impressive Harvard student even though he got a perfect 1600 on the SAT, which many more impressive students don't have. It's hard to say whether Rockefeller, Carnegie, or even modern tycoons like Larry Ellison are comparable.
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Unsure if a “tychoon”, but the Renaissance Technology founder Jim Simmons. He isn’t Terrance Tap either, however.
Bill Gates is probably the go-to answer, but I also say Steve Ballmer. Unsure if either is at the 175 genius level, though.
harder to judge the older generations. Rockefeller had to be smart, but a lot of his success is hard work and ruthlessness. I guess pioneering new things that the government hates does take creativity.
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