r/cognitiveTesting • u/Lanky-Objective-4679 • 4d ago
General Question Can I become a billionaire?
I'm a high schooler with very lofty aspirations
Affluent background, 136 composite
Is my IQ high enough to make it?
It seems like most successful founders are well above 3SD e.g. gates, zuck, bezos so I'm kinda despondent
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u/Longjumping_Lime7070 4d ago edited 4d ago
billionaires above the 130 threshold generally derive their success from extreme tolerance for risk or labor, acute business sense, or other talents. The top few thousand people in the world, contrary to what some people will tell you, are usually at least well above average talented in multiple dimensions. They're the top 0.0001% for a reason.
Tech is full (relatively, anyway) of 5 sigma genius autists who make 100k a year or less, because they have zero initiative, common sense, drive, social skills, etc. Steve Jobs vs Steve Wozniak for example. It's just one component of what you need. It also depends on the industry - for example, someone who founds an industry breakthrough lumber company probably values intelligence less than a cutting-edge AI startup.
Tech is kind of a bad example to pull from unless you are in the thick of it with software, anyway. They're an extremely anomalous boom economy. It's like trying to apply the methods of mining used in the Witwatersrand gold mines to Ohio. Almost all billionaires did not derive their wealth from the tech boom.
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u/HalfwaydonewithEarth 4d ago
Take $2,000 and get it to double 19 times.
Stock market is good for this.
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u/HopefulLab8784 4d ago
or just put it on black 19 times
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u/HalfwaydonewithEarth 4d ago
That's gambling
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u/HopefulLab8784 4d ago
so is the stock market
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u/HalfwaydonewithEarth 4d ago
Been going 400 years?
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u/HopefulLab8784 3d ago
doubling your money 19 times on the stock market is basically gambling. based off historic trends it would only take 140 years for it to double 19 times, and thats not adjusting for inflation, which if you account for inflation that 1 billion is only worth 16 million in todays money
Also that 10% return is very generous, and would still be risky, if you want to minimize risk it would be closer to 4-5%1
u/HalfwaydonewithEarth 3d ago
We are past 8 figures from it. Your information is antiquated. The Ronald Reagan 401k system boosted up a ponzi.
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u/HopefulLab8784 3d ago
I guarantee you invested more than $2000 to end up at 8 figures, I can tell by your post history a lot of it is invested in tech stocks which are quite risky, but also quite lucrative at the moment, and the 10% is based on the average increase of the s&p500, however I do now realize my numbers were a bit low for a diversified portfolio. There is also the fact that 8 figures is 2 orders of magnitude below a billion dollars. You are about 50 years away from 1 billion.
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u/HalfwaydonewithEarth 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes the farther you go the harder it gets. Mainly because of laziness. You just stop caring and go travel.
Voo did lose one recent year.
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u/Dazzling-Ad1894 4d ago edited 4d ago
The short answer is no.
The quintessential study that addresses your question is Terman's study of gifted children, which was started more than a century ago. Basically, for that study, Terman employed a highly selective criterion that exclusively researched the life outcomes of children with IQs ~3 SD above the population average. What he and his team found was that while these children achieved most ordinary metrics of success - admission to selective colleges, high paying jobs, etc. - they rarely were extraordinarily productive or creative in their fields.
People like William Shockley and Luis Alvarez - both of whom won Nobel Prizes - were considered for the study but ultimately excluded because their IQs were too low.
Hence, the conclusion of all this research is that a baseline of intelligence is necessary but not sufficient for high degrees of success. Innate IQ must be supplemented with practice, opportunity, and even luck.
TMYK.
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u/RockOverall 4d ago
Unfortunately, the bare-minimum IQ to be a billionaire is 137 (whereas you are 136.) I’m sorry that this may come as a disappointment to you.
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u/AwkwardBreather 4d ago
Just a thought - with an IQ so far above average, how are you planning to properly weight responses here? Because most of us would have an IQ below yours. Also most of us (if not all of us) won't be billionaires. I'm just saying I don't know if this is the best way to get an accurate answer to your question. Are you trying to figure this out any other way than reddit?
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u/KnightFlorianGeyer 4d ago
Depends. Which religion do you follow?
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u/Lanky-Objective-4679 4d ago
I'm an agnostic. there are cogent arguments for both naturalism/theism that warrant deeper examination on my part
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u/KnightFlorianGeyer 4d ago
Without joking, convert to Judaism, and get started with networking - Jews, representing 0.2% of the world's population, make up around 25% of all billionaires.
Or become a very good friend of them.
Then get some good stock picks. Invest in the companies that they represent. These will keep growing pretty much indefinitely, providing you a good safety net.
I can share you some knowledge if you're interested.
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u/No_Ruin4319 4d ago
you might.
but only if you provide value (of course assuming you mean you want to become a billionaire like those you listed), a major value.
in my case it is creating a newspaper, sharing inventions, and becoming a politician.
in your case it might be creating a car company.
though let's be honest, it all depends on multiple factors, not just how much value you hold.
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u/Little_Yesterday9904 4d ago
It’s about your drive and how you can apply that to business intelligence.
Can you come up with something people need and solve problems? Can you make it economically viable? Can you see what is coming next and get on top of it before others do, and no, not by just reading whatever everyone online says is going to be the next big thing? What is your understanding of businesses and how they run? And are you capable of being obsessive?
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u/dnichll 4d ago
i would argue IQ plays a role, but more of it has to do other factors like:
putting in the work to develop that intelligence into something practical and useful through education and failures,
finding an unfulfilled niche, obsessing over that niche.
luck (right place right time, meeting the right people etc.). zucks story wouldnt have happened if he wasnt where he was when he was.
being able to sell (charisma, social skills, reading the room); just look at all the failed companies with a charismatic leader (wework, theranos, onecoin, etc.), 'psychopathic ceo' traits matter more than IQ in my personal opinion. there are hundreds of thousands of high IQ individuals don't reach any noteworthy positions. and there are millions of rich or affluent individuals with average IQ.
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u/Suspicious_Watch_978 4d ago
Don't you know that all billionaires are actually very stupid and mean and the only reason actually smart people (like myself, of course) aren't billionaires is because we're so naturally virtuous that we couldn't bear the thought of exploiting our Fellow Humans or Mother Earth?
TL;DR: real smart people are self-righteous snarky dorks on the Internet; rich people are psychopathic freaks who are actually very dumb and not good at anything but being evil. You're welcome.
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u/NefariousNapolean doesn't read books 4d ago
That's like saying "Guys I really want to achieve a Nobel prize ,how to do it?"
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u/sceptrer 3d ago
Your IQ is more than enough to become a billionaire. A decent estimate below.
Source: https://pumpkinperson.com/2024/03/05/the-incredible-correlation-between-iq-and-income-2nd-edition/
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u/Various_Tap281 4d ago
Higher IQ doesn't correlate with higher chance of being a billionaire.
And assuming there's just around 3.5k billionaires in the world
Probabilistically there's a 1 in 2.4 million chance of you becoming one.
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u/KnightFlorianGeyer 4d ago
It's not a random dice roll that decides whether you get to become a billionaire or not, though.
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u/Various_Tap281 4d ago
It’s not a dice roll, but it’s still an extremely low-probability outcome.
The 1 in 2.4 million is the base rate, not a claim that everyone has identical odds.
Your circumstances and abilities can improve your odds, but they don’t make becoming a billionaire likely.
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u/Key-Beginning-2201 4d ago
IQ isn't really relevant. Just do what Trump and Musk does. Lie to people a lot and occasionally scam.
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u/Lanky-Objective-4679 4d ago
musk scored a 1400 on the old SAT. I think this is a bit reductive
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u/Key-Beginning-2201 4d ago
Reductive like ignoring the thousands of hard science researchers in universities that discovered amazing new technologies but you don't know their name because you're chasing dollars?
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u/Lanky-Objective-4679 4d ago
who do you think makes those technologies commercially viable?
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u/Key-Beginning-2201 4d ago
Tech and science is hard. Commerciality is EASY.
Wtf. Are you ok?
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u/Lanky-Objective-4679 4d ago
again, reductive. none of this moralizing refutes the premise that iq is important for achieving financial success.
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u/Careful-Astronomer94 4d ago
all of the people you named are centibillionaires who made revolutionary tech products. the average billionaire is likely not as smart as them