Famous People IQ Scores: Which Numbers Are Real?

Are famous people's IQ scores real?

Lists of famous people's IQs repeat the same numbers: Einstein 160, Hawking 160, Musk 155, Shakira 140, da Vinci 180 to 220. Very few say where a number came from. Most cite other lists.

We traced each figure back as far as it goes: to a magazine test, a court record, a 1926 research book, a tweet, or nothing at all. The table below ranks the evidence, not the people.

Famous IQ scores graded by evidence

Each row shows the number usually quoted online, where it really comes from, and whether any actual test record exists. "No test on record" means we found no published test, date or examiner. It does not prove the person was never tested, only that no evidence has been made public.

How to check any famous IQ claim

A genuine IQ score answers four questions. Most famous numbers fail the first one.

1. Which test? A real result names it: Stanford-Binet, Wechsler (WAIS), Raven's Matrices. "An IQ test" is not enough.
2. When and by whom? Look for a date and an examiner or publication. Kasparov's results pass; Einstein's 160 does not.
3. What kind of score? Old childhood tests used a ratio formula that gives huge numbers for bright children. Modern scores have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The two cannot be compared.
4. Is it a conversion? Numbers back-calculated from SAT scores, grades or achievements are guesses, not measurements.

Two more warning signs: Mensa does not confirm who its members are, so "according to Mensa" claims are suspect; and adult scores above about 160 are beyond what standard tests can reliably measure.

The famous people who actually took a test

A handful of famous people have real test results. They show what an honest IQ record looks like, and how far it can be from the numbers that circulate.

Garry Kasparov: 135 and 123

In 1987 the German news magazine Der Spiegel sent a team to Baku to test the world chess champion over three days. He took three major intelligence tests (one compiled specially for him by psychologist Hans Jürgen Eysenck, John Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, and Adolf Otto Jäger's Berlin Intelligence Structure test), plus a chess test and memory tasks. The magazine reported 135 on Eysenck's test and 123 on Raven's.

Der Spiegel drew the lesson itself: an IQ can never be more than a vague indication, as the 12-point gap between two tests on the same man shows. It also reported no correlation between IQ and playing strength when it compared Kasparov with 30 German Bundesliga players it tested.

Marilyn vos Savant: a real test, an invalid number

At age ten, in 1956, vos Savant sat the 1937 Stanford-Binet. Her result was converted with the old ratio formula into an IQ of about 228, and Guinness listed her under "Highest IQ" from the mid-1980s until 1989. But that test's own manual did not permit IQs above 170, and Guinness retired the category in 1990 because IQ tests were too unreliable to name a single record holder. She also scored 46 out of 48 on the Mega Test, an unsupervised puzzle test published in Omni magazine in 1985, which its author Ronald Hoeflin reported as 186.

Chris Langan: tested, but no published score

In 1999 the ABC programme 20/20 had neuropsychologist Robert Novelly test Langan, and reported that he scored beyond the top of the test's range. No test name, score sheet or norms were published, so the popular 195 to 210 is a media estimate rather than a recorded score. His other reported results come from the Mega Test, an unsupervised take-home test that reviewers have criticised as unstandardised.

Richard Feynman: a "respectable" 125

His biographer James Gleick reports that a school IQ test put the Nobel-winning physicist at 125, about the top 5 percent. The test and record were never published, so it is a reported result. It contrasts sharply with his performance in the 1939 Putnam mathematics competition, where he was named one of the top five entrants in the United States and Canada.

Newton, da Vinci and Goethe: estimates from 1926

The huge numbers given to historical figures nearly all trace back to one book: Catharine Cox's Genetic Studies of Genius, Volume II (1926). Cox and her colleagues read biographies of 301 eminent people born between 1450 and 1850 and estimated what IQ their childhood and youth achievements implied. She gave two ratings: one for life up to age 17 (AI) and one for ages 17 to 26 (AII).

These are informed guesses on the old ratio scale, not test results, and Cox said openly that thin records pulled the ratings down. She published a reliability figure for each person's data. Leonardo's was just 0.20, a very low figure. Cox's main ratings are also lower than the numbers that circulate today:

Cox also calculated statistically "corrected" estimates meant to offset the thin records, and these push many ratings higher. Those adjusted figures and later retellings are where the bigger online numbers come from, not new evidence. Anyone born after 1850, including Einstein, Tesla and Hawking, was outside Cox's study altogether, so no historical estimate of this kind exists for them.

Einstein, Hawking, Tesla and Musk: no test on record

None of the four scientists and inventors people search for most has a published IQ score. Each has its own page tracing the claims.

Einstein's 160 has no traceable origin; earlier magazines gave him 205, 192 and 207. Asked his IQ by The New York Times Magazine in 2004, Hawking answered: "I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers." Tesla was in his late forties when the first intelligence test appeared in 1905. Musk has never published a result; the closest data point is a reported SAT score of about 1400.

Celebrity IQ claims: where they really come from

Celebrity figures are the least reliable of all, and they follow a few repeating patterns.

The rumour: Shakira's 140

In June 2013 several outlets, including HuffPost, reported that Mensa International had published a list of celebrity IQs giving Shakira 140. A day later Mensa said it had released no such list, and that it does not confirm or deny whether anyone is a member. HuffPost updated its story, but the number still circulates.

The unexplained number: Sharon Stone's 154

Stone's 154 has been repeated in profiles since at least the late 1990s. We could not find a test name, a date or an examiner anywhere, so nothing published lets anyone check it.

The real achievement, unsourced score: Natalie Portman

Portman's 140 has no known source. Her academic record is documented: a Harvard psychology degree in 2003 and, under her birth name Natalie Hershlag, co-authorship of a 2002 infant brain-imaging study in NeuroImage. The number has no such record.

The SAT conversion: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg

Gates's 160 is usually back-calculated from an SAT score of 1590 out of 1600 that is itself widely repeated but not confirmed. Zuckerberg's 152 has no stated source at all. Neither has published an IQ test result.

The self-claim: Donald Trump

On 9 May 2013 Trump tweeted: "Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it!" No IQ score for him has been made public. In January 2018 the White House physician, Ronny Jackson, reported that he scored 30 out of 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). The MoCA is a short screening test that helps doctors detect mild cognitive impairment, not an IQ test. A full score means no signs of impairment were found; it does not measure IQ in either direction.

Famous people with low IQ scores: what is documented?

Lists of famous people with low IQs are just as unreliable as the high-IQ lists, and they often attach numbers to people who never took an IQ test. We found only one documented case, and it is usually misreported.

On 24 January 1964 Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, took the Army's mental aptitude test as part of his pre-induction exam for the draft. His score put him at the 16th percentile, below the 30th percentile the military then required. He was retested in March with the same result, and on 26 March 1964 he was classified 1-Y, "not qualified under current standards". When the standard was later lowered to the 15th percentile, his draft board reclassified him 1-A on 17 February 1966.

The "IQ 78" seen online is not a recorded score. The Army test was a screening tool for military service, not an IQ test, and its percentiles were set against a military reference group. Even a rough conversion of the 16th percentile to today's IQ scale gives about 85, not 78. One screening result from 1964 says little about a person's overall abilities.

Does a famous person's IQ tell you much?

Less than the lists suggest. Feynman's reported 125 and Kasparov's 123 to 135 are high but not "genius" numbers, and both men reached the top of their fields. Two future Nobel physicists, William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, were screened as children for Lewis Terman's famous study of gifted children and did not score high enough to be included (Warne, Larsen and Clark, 2020).

Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, reviewing decades of research on estimated intelligence and eminence, found the link real but modest (Simonton, 2009). Creativity, persistence, training and opportunity explain much more. A real IQ score describes performance on a test on one day; an invented one tells you nothing at all.

Sources

• Der Spiegel (1987). Genieblitze und Blackouts: Der SPIEGEL testete Intelligenz, Gedächtnis und Schachkunst Garri Kasparows. Der Spiegel 52/1987. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/genieblitze-und-blackouts-a-1a1cbaba-0002-0001-0000-000013526693
• Cox, C. M. (1926). Genetic Studies of Genius, Vol. II: The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses. Stanford University Press. Full text: https://archive.org/details/geneticstudiesof011555mbp
• Terman, L. M., & Merrill, M. A. (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Houghton Mifflin.
• Morris, S. (1985, April). The One in a Million IQ Test (the Mega Test). Omni Magazine.
• Carlson, R. (1991). The Mega Test. In D. J. Keyser & R. C. Sweetland (Eds.), Test Critiques, Vol. VIII (pp. 431–435). PRO-ED.
• Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. Little, Brown. (Chapters 3 and 4 discuss Chris Langan.)
• Gleick, J. (1992). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Pantheon.
• Clay v. United States, 397 F.2d 901 (5th Cir. 1968). https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F2/397/397.F2d.901.24991_1.html
• Bohn, M. K. (2017, April 30). 50 years ago one of America's greatest sports heroes refused to be drafted. Tribune News Service. https://www.postguam.com/sports/nation/50-years-ago-one-of-america-s-greatest-sports-heroes-refused-to-be-drafted/article_55219578-2c07-11e7-9790-6f7feca8a427.html
• Solomon, D. (2004, December 12). The Science of Second-Guessing (Questions for Stephen Hawking). The New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/the-science-of-secondguessing.html
• Moreno, C. (2013, June 5; updated June 6). Shakira's IQ Of 140 Makes Colombian Singer A 'Genius,' Mensa International Reports (UPDATE). HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/shakira-iq_n_3390658
• Baird, A. A., Kagan, J., Gaudette, T., Walz, K. A., Hershlag, N., & Boas, D. A. (2002). Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy. NeuroImage, 16(4), 1120–1125. https://doi.org/10.1006/nimg.2002.1170
• Harvard Gazette (2015, May). Portman: I too battled self-doubt. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/05/portman-i-too-battled-self-doubt/
• CBS News (2018, January 16). White House doctor: "No concerns" about Trump's cognitive health. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-doctor-no-concerns-about-trumps-cognitive-health/
• Putterman, S. (2019, May 14). Social media post sharing newspaper story of Trump having a 73 IQ is fake. PolitiFact. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/may/14/viral-image/social-media-post-sharing-newspaper-story-trump-ha/
• Stanley, J. C. (1987, March/April). Making the IMO team: The power of early identification and encouragement. Gifted Child Today, 22–23. (Terence Tao scored 760 on SAT-M at age 8.)
• Warne, R. T., Larsen, R., & Clark, J. (2020). Low base rates and a high IQ selection threshold prevented Terman from identifying future Nobelists. Intelligence, 82, 101488. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101488
• Simonton, D. K. (2009). The "Other IQ": Historiometric assessments of intelligence and related constructs. Review of General Psychology, 13(4), 315–326. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017141