How High Is Bill Gates' IQ?
As the man behind Microsoft and one of the richest people on the planet, it's only to be expected that Bill Gates has a pretty decent head on his shoulders. But exactly how high is the man's IQ? As Forbes tells us, Gates once said: "Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we won't have a future." With that in mind, it's weird that it's fairly hard to find any information about his own intelligence quotient, even when you ask him directly: In an interview with NDTV, Gates skillfully side-stepped the question by saying that he has done pretty well in IQ tests, but pointed out that he's basically just good at tests and the kind of "goofy questions" IQ tests tend to entail.
As Quartz reports, Gates does indeed have a history of getting high scores on standardized intelligence tests and is quite likely among the top one percent of the population. IQ Test alleges that Gates' exact score is 160, which may or may not be in the ballpark. Still, one could argue that his actual, verifiable IQ doesn't really matter, because...
Bill Gates doesn't really care how high his (or anyone's) IQ is
The reason Bill Gates avoids hard IQ numbers is simple: As CNBC tells us, the billionaire has grown to think that intelligence isn't as important as he used to believe back in the day. Young Gates was a math whiz kid and classic "high IQ" fodder, which caused him to believe that high IQ equaled all-purpose greatness. As years went by, he grew to realize there are actually many kinds of intelligence and many ways to use your particular type to your advantage, and regrets that he didn't realize it much earlier in his career. "I was so naive about different skill sets," he said in 2018. "I thought if somebody had a high IQ, they could be good at everything. The idea that you needed to blend these different types of skills together, that always continued to surprise me."
Interestingly, Gates' gentle lecture about the nature of intelligence and the need to embrace all forms of it was an answer to a question from a fan who asked him what advice he would give to his younger self. The guy behind the question? A young entrepreneur called Mark Zuckerberg.