Elon Musk’s IQ, Stephen Hawking’s IQ and Other Famous People’s IQ Scores

Search for Elon Musk’s IQ and you will find a confident number, usually 155. Search for Stephen Hawking’s and you will see 160. Neither number comes from a test result anyone has ever seen. This guide traces where these famous IQ scores come from, shows which well-known people really did sit an IQ test (the results are surprising), and gives you a quick way to tell a measured score from a guess.

What is Elon Musk’s IQ?

The honest answer: no IQ score for Musk has ever been made public, so nobody knows. The debate about his intelligence runs entirely on guesses. When Newsweek covered that debate in February 2025, it asked Musk for comment and did not receive a response before publication.

So where does the “Elon Musk IQ 155” claim come from? In an April 2025 essay, New York Times critic Amanda Hess followed the trail of the most-shared figure (reprinted by the Center for Genetics and Society). Her finding: a circulating screenshot shows Fox News giving Musk an IQ of 155, citing Sociosite, which Hess calls “a junk website.” That is the whole chain. No test, no date, no psychologist.

The same essay shows how wide the guesses run:

• 100 to 110: Seth Abramson, who has written about Musk, said on X he would put the number there, citing “zero evidence in his biography for anything higher.”
• Above 130: economics commentator Noah Smith, working from Musk’s reported SAT score.
• “Probably even a genius”: pollster Nate Silver’s guess.
• “Seriously high I.Q.”: Donald Trump’s description, with no number attached.

Same man, guesses spread across more than 50 points. When estimates of Musk’s IQ disagree that much, you are looking at opinions, not measurements.

Elon Musk’s SAT score and school record: what they tell us

The closest thing to hard data on Musk’s IQ is an admissions test. Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography reports that Musk scored 1400 on the SAT, as Newsweek summarized. That is a real, strong score, and the SAT is not unrelated to IQ. A 2019 review in the Journal of Intelligence by psychologist Meredith Frey reports that SAT scores correlated up to about 0.8 with measures of general intelligence in two studies, and that SAT results can be converted to an IQ-style scale with an equation.

Three things stop that conversion from producing a precise IQ:

1. A correlation of 0.8 is not 1.0. The same review notes the SAT “is not a perfect measure of intelligence.” A converted score is a band, not a point.
2. The scale has changed. Musk took the SAT before the College Board recentered the scale in the mid-1990s (he was already at Penn by 1992). Federal statistics convert older scores to the recentered scale before comparing them, so a 1400 from that era does not mean the same as a 1400 today.
3. Different converters, different answers. Smith lands above 130; Newsweek suggests the mid-130s. Both are educated guesses.

Two other facts often get stretched. In 2021, Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, shared a University of Pretoria letter saying her son had scored A+ in operating and programming on a computer aptitude test, and wrote that, as she remembered it, he had to be retested because the examiners had never seen such a high score (Gulf News). An aptitude test for programming is not an IQ test.

The same report covers his education: Queen’s University in Ontario from 1990, a transfer to the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and degrees in economics (from Wharton) and physics in 1997.

Stephen Hawking’s IQ: “I have no idea”

Stephen Hawking’s IQ is the second most searched famous score, and here the man himself settled the question. In a December 12, 2004, interview with Deborah Solomon for The New York Times Magazine, published as “The Science of Second-Guessing,” he was asked what his IQ was (quotation record). His answer:

“I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.”

His record speaks more clearly than any number. According to the University of Cambridge’s obituary, Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, earned a first-class degree in natural science at Oxford, showed in 1974 that black holes have a temperature and emit radiation, held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics from 1979 to 2009 and died on March 14, 2018, at 76.

He was not a star pupil. The official Hawking biography says he “was never more than halfway up the class” at St Albans School, yet his classmates nicknamed him “Einstein.” A school ranking, a nickname and a world-famous career: none of them is an IQ score.

Where the “160” comes from

The 160 travels mostly through news stories about children who “beat Einstein and Hawking” on a Mensa test. In 2022, NBC News reported that an 11-year-old in England had earned the highest possible score, 162, adding that Einstein and Hawking “were both estimated to have IQs around 160.” A 2015 Gazette story about a 12-year-old went further and said the two physicists “both scored 160.” They did not.

There is also a scale problem. The Gazette names the paper as the Cattell III B, and according to Mensa’s supervisory psychologist, Abbie Salny, that test uses a standard deviation of 24, not 15. Computed from the normal distribution, 162 on that scale is about 2.6 standard deviations above average, roughly 139 on the standard IQ scale most modern tests use. Impressive, but these headlines compare a real child’s score on one scale with two guesses on another.

Which famous people have actually taken an IQ test?

Documented scores for famous people are rare, and when they do surface, they rarely match the legend. Here are the best-sourced cases.

Richard Feynman: a reported 125

The Nobel-winning physicist reportedly scored 125 on a school IQ test. In a 2011 Psychology Today interview, psychologist Jonathan Wai and physicist Steve Hsu note that the figure has been reported, including by Feynman himself. Hsu suspects the test leaned on verbal skills rather than math. The same piece notes that Feynman earned the highest score in the country by a large margin on the Putnam mathematics competition. Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton has written that both Feynman and DNA co-discoverer James Watson had scores too low for Mensa.

John F. Kennedy: 119 on a school test

Kennedy biographer Thomas Reeves wrote that Kennedy “was actually given an IQ test before entering Choate. His score was 119” (History News Network). Computed from the normal distribution, that is a high-average result, higher than about 90% of people. Compare it with Simonton’s 2006 historiometric estimate for Kennedy, which Reeves quotes: 159.8. One measured number, one estimated number, about 40 points apart. A single test at around 14 has its own margin of error, but it is still more evidence than a reconstruction from biographies.

Muhammad Ali: an Army screening test

In 1964, Ali was classified 1-Y, ineligible for the draft, “because of unsatisfactory scores on the mental acuity test,” and in 1966 he was reclassified 1-A after the military lowered its standards (Andscape). The number usually quoted is 78. A 2016 Reuters fact file reports that the US Army measured his IQ at 78 and quotes his autobiography: “I only said I was the greatest, not the smartest.” Keep in mind that it was a group qualification test for draftees, a screening test rather than an IQ measure, so it is a poor guide to Ali’s IQ.

Test cut-offs can also miss future stars: Lewis Terman’s study of gifted children screened out William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, who both went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, a story we tell in what IQ is considered genius.

Chess world champion Garry Kasparov is a rare adult who was actually tested: in 1987 Der Spiegel reported that he scored 135 on one test and 123 on another (Der Spiegel, 1987). Names that top “highest IQ” lists, like Marilyn vos Savant and Terence Tao, have their own debated histories; see the highest IQ ever recorded. Einstein never took an IQ test at all, as our guide to Einstein’s IQ explains.

IQ of famous people: where celebrity numbers come from

Many celebrity IQ figures circulate through list articles that copy each other. One episode shows how they spread. In June 2013, HuffPost reported, citing the Mexican agency Notimex, that Mensa had revealed Shakira’s IQ as 140. The story was later updated: Mensa International denied releasing any list of members’ names and IQs, and said it does not confirm or deny whether someone is a member.

Many other celebrity numbers from the same period appear only on IQ list articles, never with a test, a date or a named source, so treat them as unverified.

Mensa membership itself is a different, checkable kind of fact. Actress Geena Davis, who won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for The Accidental Tourist (1988), is listed as a Mensa member in reference biographies. But membership tells you about a threshold, not a number. American Mensa accepts scores from approximately 150 different standardized intelligence tests, each with its own qualifying score. Any specific score you see attached to her name comes from the same unverified lists.

Famous people’s IQ scores: claimed vs. documented

Here is everything above in one place. Notice how short the “documented” column is.

Why most famous IQ scores are estimates

Three reasons explain why famous-people IQ lists are mostly fiction.

Most famous people never take a public IQ test. Adults rarely have a reason to, and the few who join Mensa are not asked to publish a number. When a score does exist, it is usually from childhood, like Kennedy’s or Feynman’s, and it surfaces decades later through a biographer.

Estimates get repeated until they look like facts. Abbie Salny, Mensa’s supervisory psychologist, once dismissed a book claiming IQs of 180 and 200 for Alexander Pope and Charles Darwin, pointing out that both died long before the first intelligence test was produced. She also noted that there is no formal definition of a “genius” score. Researchers do have a method for estimating historical IQs from biographies, called historiometry, which we explain in the Einstein’s IQ article. Kennedy’s 119 versus 159.8 shows how far such estimates can drift from a measured score.

Scales are not interchangeable. A 162 on a test with a standard deviation of 24 and a 162 on a test with a standard deviation of 15 describe very different levels of rarity. Lists rarely say which scale they mean, if any. Our explainer on what IQ is and how it is calculated covers why the scale matters.

And even a perfect number would not explain a career. Shockley and Alvarez fell below a gifted cut-off and still won Nobel Prizes; Feynman’s reported 125 sits far below the 160 the internet hands out to famous physicists. Ability matters, but so do persistence, training, curiosity and luck, and no IQ test measures those.

Your own score beats a celebrity estimate

Elon Musk’s IQ will probably stay a guessing game, and Stephen Hawking made clear he never cared to know his. You can skip the guessing. Take a real test and your number arrives with everything the celebrity figures lack: a test, a date and a known scale, plus a view of which kinds of reasoning come easiest to you.

If you are curious, take the IQtonics IQ test. It has 40 questions across five areas (patterns, spatial reasoning, numbers, logic and memory) that get progressively harder, with a 20-minute time limit. Your result appears on the same mean-100, standard-deviation-15 scale used throughout this article, with a percentile and a cognitive profile of your strengths. Starting the test is free; your full results unlock with a trial membership, which renews automatically unless you cancel it. It is an online test, not a clinical assessment, and, in the spirit of Hawking’s answer, it is best used for curiosity, not bragging.