Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday.
like kim dotcom. same guy to me.
There’s this website that listed bunch of stuff about Kim Dotcom and his ventures. (the list barely scratches the surface. But the important thing is that people thought he was hack decades ago.)
When I visited the site last time, I was like “ohhhhh, they’ve found a picture of Kim wearing an SS helmet. I really didn’t know what else I was expecting.”
I’m surprised that the website doesn’t list Felon Muskow as a charlatan.
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I’ve met a couple people who’ve met Trump, and let’s just say “He’s the dumbest person I’ve ever met” is the default opinion of him.
Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess
I guarantee his IQ is made up too. Not that an IQ test actually means shit.
he abandonded his schooling once he got his visa, and did some shady sht to get his BROTHER one too. hes more or less just a richer version of trump, just slightly"smarter".
IQ tests are not an objective measurement of intelligence! It kinda measures pattern recognition and some other skill! Its a scam to sell preparatory classes for itself!
40-50-ish years ago they quite popular! You were required to take one for uni admissions, for appliying to work… Well before we found out its bs!
I agree. Its also super biased. I wouldn’t be surprised if it correlated with financial success in certain demographics in certain locations/communities, but like you say, it’s not an objective measure of intelligence.
We had to take a mandatory IQ test at the beginning of military service, my score was in the highest percentile and because of this I ended up in officer training. It wasn’t the Mensa type test, they measured our language, math and pattern recognition skills with a vast battery of questions with a time limit.
Many friends of mine got average IQ scores in the army test but they are the ones who are really smart and extremely succesful.
In university I got a chance to take the Mensa type test and got ~140 points. I just laughed it off since at the same time I was struggling to pass my courses, while my friends who got average scores passed them with ease.
I do not consider myself really “smart” in any way, I just have a very good memory and I’m pretty adept at solving problems. Otherwise I’m just about as average a guy can be.
Uh-huh and everyone stood up to clap buddy?
You know, its a thing to jerk off to yer fantasies but your fantasy is a high IQ score? Really? Was Ariana Grande not in danger in your dreams or something?
No.
The whole point - which you seem to have missed - was that getting a “good” score in some test can mean very little or nothing in real life.
It just means that you’re good at that sort of mental exercise.
No that meant that you could afford a 2-3-4 week long preparatory course!or were pursuing one of a few very specific fields of mathematics! And you putting good in quotation marks strongly insinuates that you have no idea what a 140 on an IQ test means, which makes it absolutely impossible for you to have received it since it would have been explained to you! And ppl do tend to remember the equivalent of winning the olimpics, you know?
But I am sure that you received military training 40-50 years ago! Say, where and when did you receive it under whose preliminary command?
I’ve never taken any preparatory courses for anything and I’m not really good with mathematics, so no and no again.
And why I put the quotation marks around good is a reflection of my native language, we do that when one wishes to express their personal disbelief or doubt. I am well aware that the ~140 score is considered a good one by the designers of the test.
I served in the late 90’s and there have been several refresher courses but I’m not at the liberty to discuss any specifics of service matters publicly. If you have done military service you know this.
IQ tests went out of fashion mid 80-ties and they were only ever required in the very very top universities! There is no military academy in the world where you would have been asked for one!
140 is not a good a score! 140 is fucking legendary!!! Which would have been again explained to you if you ever achieved that, which again you would remember since its the equivalent of winning an olympic! But you don’t have a singular fucking clue what a 140 means on an IQ test… How very curious…
Ones military service starts at the end of their training, then you will be required to put your oaths down! Your bulshitting couldn’t even be chalked up as a semblance of protecting your anonymity! Graduation lists of military establishments are not public and even if they were there are 70-200-ish cadets in every year!
And soldiers can and do talk constantly about their service (ps thats how you can spot valor stealers on the internet, ppl like you :))! They are not allowed to talk of restricted info and missions! If you were a career secret sevice agent, you would not talk about being a soldier on the internet!
Another thing that makes absolutely no sense are the refresher courses and is a quite stupid attempt of weaseling out of the question! Most manuals were written in the 60-ties and have yet to be updated! And if you received new equipment you would not be sent back to uni! You would be taken to a field to practice with it!
Now tell me! Does your minsicular penis feel larger for lying and pretending to be a big man on the internet?
Read it again. This post is not a flex.
He edited his comment, look up his edit history
Yes! If you know how to look up edit history, please do so! There has been no editing on my part.
Pffffffffffffffff 😂
You know its so sad that this might even work out for you, after all Trump supporters too refused to read the jan files
But you have yet to answer my one question! Does your miniscular penis feel larger for lying on the internet?
Full-scale cognitive batteries (sophisticated IQ tests) are great… for diagnostics. If someone has difficulties identifying the domains where the need extra help, accommodations. I order them all the time and they guide me on how to manage patients. The most telling thing about IQs is that I’ve never seen it in on a resume, not even mensa memberships.
But surely you are aware that companies are trying to sell it off as objectively measurement of int, successfully so since most of the population regards them so? This lil part is my issue!
of course. they do it because people are insecure.
Being interested in an objective measurement of your intellect? Silliest fucking thing I have ever heard!
The belief that an commercial IQ test is an “objective measure of your intellect” is a pretty good subjective measure of your intellect.
I am sorry, it is silly to think that in intelligence test measures intelligence
I don’t know if it’s fully BS. It’s just another data point to add for the ahhkkksshhualllyy crowd imo. But pattern recognition I think has high importance in actual intelligence.
Yes, thank you!
If I were to sell you a medicine that helps with mild headaches as an all healing magical remedy would you call it bs?
I’d call it great for headaches and not great for anything else.
I wouldn’t call it bs because it works great for headaches. I’d call the claim that it works for everything as bs.
…
So, you know how there’s a button on the top-left of your keyboard for ending sentences? Believe it or not, there’s also one on the bottom right as well! It looks like this: .
Perchance you should demonstrate it in your own sentences?
like this .
If you meant the dot(?) as a demonstrative then you yourself have not ended your sentence! If you meant the empty before the dot(?) as the demonstrative then you make no sense!
It’s a relative measure of performance for narrow and specific set of tasks. It’s not BS, that’s like saying the 100m dash is BS. It’s just that people have wildly overstated the general implications of the measure.
The people who have wildly overstated the implications of IQ are the ones who developed and use it. Your analogy would be more correct if the 100m dash was used to measure the freshness of your breath.
That’s the central problem with IQ. Intelligence as a thing that can be measured is much closer to “freshness of breath” than it is to 100 meters. It’s subjective and colloquial. You admit as much yourself that IQ tests measure something, but not intelligence.
I think there is and always has been massive contention in even defining intelligence. Is it the same as wisdom? What about being smart? Are these all the same thing? How does experience inform success in general problem solving? What even IS a “general” problem?
I think it’s still a valuable tool to assess peoples ability to recognize and apply transformations, implications, boolean operators, and arethmetic sequences.
But the idea that it provides some insight into the innate nature of a mind is preposterous. You CAN study for an IQ test: exactly the 4 things I mentioned are things you can study, and once you’ve mastered you’ll be sitting on a 160+ result.
So, the base underlying assumption that these things are not learnable. That is wrong.
But, the idea that mastery of implication, transformation, boolean operators and arethmetic sequences don’t provide a foundational system for certain tasks is also maybe not quite right either…
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of “athleticism”, which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
To your point that the designers intended it to be a measure of the abstract notion of innate intellectual capacity, yeah maybe that was the attempt. Maybe that’s how they pitched it. It isn’t. Tough shit.
But that doesn’t suddenly imply it’s nothing.
Like most things (a degree, years of experience, SAT score, story points, Myers-Briggs etc etc) capitalism has completely fucked them. Business is so fucking lazy they just want to boil down assesment for suitability to enumerable values on a form. Just because metrics are inappropriately used and abused by capitalism doesn’t mean they’re not measuring something.
So, this was a super lengthy reiteration that IQ tests measure something, but it isn’t “innate general intelligence”. But to say it’s as irrelevant as “freshness of breath” is maybe hyperbolic.
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of “athleticism”, which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
Hard to argue that careful statement!
Hey thought of how it could be used for good, to support:
valuable tool to assess peoples abilit[ies]
I imagine a school administrator examining the tails of their school‘s distribution and using the knowledge to personalize education. Say, a bright kid isn’t being challenged and achieves straight Cs. (Privacy and fairness implications, I know)
Yeah I think using a renamed version of the test could be a good way to try and find gaps between aspiration and current state of foundational skills, for certain aspirations.
If a kid dreams of being a lawyer, but their scores are on the tail end, that’s a perfect opportunity to revisit the foundations of formal logic. Just because some kids have managed to grok those foundational concepts independent of school doesn’t mean others are incapable. Because let’s face it, secondary school isn’t teaching formal logic.
That being said, real tailored mechanisms would be superior to finding gaps. But, in the absence of such mechanisms, an IQ test could be an accessible stand-in.
Myers-Briggs
Myers-Briggs manages to go way beyond in the levels of bullshit compared to even these other items.
My favorite story about corporations using these kinds of tests is when some engineer I knew was interviewing at a few different major engineering firms. One of their HR people told him after one of of several interviews that the next time would also involve a personality test! He knew he had at least 2 other roles in the bag, he was just finishing up this company. He asked her - “are they also going to read my tea leaves?” - and declined to proceed further with that company. Because the notion that HR were gatekeeping for…checks notes…engineering positions at an engineering firm by using such debunked horseshit was something that instilled zero confidence in how the rest of the place might be getting run, and I absolutely don’t blame him. I never had that as part of anyone’s hiring “process” - it was always something introduced later as part of some “team-building exercise”.
My favorite direct experience was when another co-worker who was awake and fine with asking pointed questions asked one of the people administering some “personality test” if she knew if they had done any tests where they gave the “results” to the wrong person, and see how they reacted (he was basically asking if they tested for the Barnum effect). Answer: no. (Of course)
Anyway, I suggest reading The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves
Well said.
The 100m dash measures exactly what it says; the ability to dash 100m. Intelligence Quotient does not measure what it says. That’s the issue. It’s isn’t what it claims to be, so is BS.
If the 100 meter dash was called tetranlon it would be bs! If the intelligence test were called pattern recognition test then it wouldn’t be bs!
And what if I called a rose a stinkweed?
I think it’s a completely valid criticism, and I agree with the critism.
I just think semantic hang-ups are really… Exhausting and of minimal value. Terrible ratio.
Extend the principle of charity, hurdle it, then get to the meat.
My issue is not with its name!
The companies still are trying to sell IQ test off as objective measurement of intelligence and overwhelming measurement of the population believes it to be so!
That’s a useful comparison. I like it. There are plenty of popular anecdotes of the world’s best athlete in a particular sport attempting another and being terribly mediocre, so it probably resonates with the average person better than my usual many-types-of-intelligence argument.
What you want to bet he had someone else take the test for him lol? Judging by how he plays games and all, it seems to be his m.o….
IQ tests are combo test of how white and how autistic are you. All tests are biased, and what do you bet when he got his super special smart boy IQ label he was in South Africa and the test administrator was another white dude.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the person administering the test was also paid under the table by Musk Snr to make sure Elon’s result looked better than it actually was.
He was at a private school, it’s just called tuition, and it’s there to make sure powerful people’s kids stay in power. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
A failson that failed upwards
And the Understatement of the Year award goes to…
Seriously, when I first heard of this guy, I thought he must be smart. Then he started talking about things in my career field, and thought wow, that’s a stupid thing to say. The more he talked, the more I realised he’s a moron about nearly everything. Now I’m not convinced he can actually get dressed unassisted.
A few years ago I watched a clip of Musk giving a tour of a sort of museum SpaceX has that shows the evolution of their rockets. At one point he was talking about how the more recent rockets had fewer “fiddly bits” on the outside.
He definitely dresses himself !
My thoughts exactly! After that it was like a domino effect… I realized that probably everything this guy ever said and done was pure BS. Fake it until you make it.
And yet executives in your career field probably would have nodded sagely, assuming that affinity to Musk would confer an appearance of intelligence to them, because they have no idea about the field either.
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
About the only consistent ability they have is to be complete sociopaths to screw over customers, employees, and shareholders alike. Which admittedly is a pretty powerful ability…
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
It’s the “Peter principle”:
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”: employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
Feel like I see a variant where they were never competent, and promoted based more on willingness to game the system than results.
For example, there was this guy who started about the same time as I did, and he was utterly useless. The team would largely endeavor to keep him away from anything important, but he’d still screw things up and cry for help and after saddling his mistake on someone who was going to stay after hours, he’d just leave and hope it got fixed. If the person sorted out his problem, he’d make a big deal about how hard his problem was and now it is resolved and how awesome it was for him to pull it off in spite of the headwinds.
Some years later, the person was in an executive position and the person that pretty much did all the work he was supposed to do had zero promotions. Most of us had learned our lesson and were content to let him thrash (his work wasn’t really important), but there was one guy that couldn’t stand to see work not happen successfully, and thanks to that he was able to get ahead.
The other thing has been that work never promotes from within, they always get some exterior hire that seems to have the qualifications more like ‘was a cool guy at the golf course’ or ‘son of a friend I owe a favor to’.
I mean, he is using his position to gain wealth and power. Im sure he didnt get there by being stupid. No, hes not some Tony Stark level engineer and his intellectual and engineering achievements are nothing of note. Hes really good at swindling people and getting a large proportion of the population to like him, that takes some talent.
Survivorship bias.
You don’t hear about all the Elons who made a bad bet with the money from their dad’s apartheid emerald mine, and ended up living meager multi-millionaire lives instead.
This. A million times this! For so many things in life. So many persons fail to get this. Entrepreneurs, billionaires, success-stories.
Succeeding doesn’t mean you made the right decision with the information you had; it means you made the right decision now that we know the outcome.
While I agree with the premise of the book, everyone who has met/worked with/knows Seth Abramson all day what a piece of shit grifter hack he is, so I don’t know how much confidence I have in the book overall.
I do not doubt that evidence to support this assertion exists, but Abramson is always chasing the next big thing and bitches about how no one likes him on bsky like an angsty teenager. He’s just cringe.
I was actually kinda interested in the upcoming book… Can anyone else confirm if his work is garbage? I’m not super familiar with him.
Man this book will probably be banned before it comes out
Eh, I despise Musk and believe he is a grave threat.
But this “Musk isn’t smart” narrative is a waste of time and underestimating Musk makes him more dangerous.
Tesla was a nothing burger company before he acquired it. SpaceX has been highly successful under his leadership. Musk may not have provided much technical knowledge, but he’s accomplished too much for it to be random luck, and steering such companies, even if not on a daily basis, is going to require applied intellectual skill.
Edit: guys you can downvote all you want but underestimating Musk just weakens your position and aids him. You’re not going to an Ivy League school with average or below intelligence.
You’re also not starting and guiding various companies to high level success if you’re dumb. Yes Musk has failed projects. Essentially every company and many if not most entrepreneurs have suffered failures.
Allegedly he also got a relatively high SAT score (1400) according to Isaacson, a respected biographer (I’d want to see hard proof however).
Musk’s IQ is probably something like 125, not 160. But it’s not going to be 90 or other like that.
But I guess you can go ahead and play into his hand and boost him by underestimating him.
Imma quote from the article.
Abramson noted, “It is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them."
Musk’s wealth isn’t the best indicator of his intelligence. It’s more circumstantial evidence at best.
“corporations with those who own them.”
This veers towards been an non sequitur. The claim isn’t that Musk is the corporation or that he is responsible for every decision. However, he is one of the (and probably THE) prominent voices in his companies and his decisions can massively impact the company’s trajectory. One success is luck, multiple successes suggests there’s a lot more than luck at play.
You’re really underestimating the contributions of people like the COO (Shotwell, who by all accounts, really reigns Musk in) and the actual engineering talent at SpaceX. Musk is hardly the first to come up with some of the aerospace ideas, but SpaceX is the first to push through the failure to success through a rapid prototype model.
lmao I am underestimating no one. Guys… touch some grass.
Musks’s technical knowledge is probably pretty mid. Musk sure as hell isn’t designing the rockets.
Acknowledging that Musk isn’t an idiot in no way devalues the work of the many, many intelligent people around him. Why you’d think that I’m taking anything away from anyone else is baffling. Literally baffling. How did you come to that conclusion?
SpaceX was the leading private space company before he acquired it - it has actually lost ground to competitors since then but has an extremely passionate team behind it.
Tesla was the first company to seriously take a swing at automated response with an eye to FSD - they’ve since fallen far behind Waymo and other competitors.
When Musk worked at PayPal Thiel described him as a crazy risk taker and had him ousted as CEO while he was on two weeks of PTO for his honeymoon.
Musk is a huge fucking dumbass with enough money to fail horribly over and over.
you’re not getting into UPENN being a complete idiot. Whoever started the company, Musk oversaw periods of the growth in SpaceX, Tesla, Paypal etc.
Musk is (edit: not) the smartest person in the world like he thinks he is. But it’s nearly an objective fact that he’s not stupid.
This is such a dumb hill to die on, and more importantly it benefits Musk.
edit: and as for failed programs, welcome to the world of business. Google, Amazon, Microsoft Apple, etc. constantly launch ideas that don’t pan out. Are their leaders and engineers and everyone else dumb because a project failed?
And everyone there said it was because they had a dedicated team distracting Musk from the real work. He is, in fact, very dumb.
Imagine being as stupid as this clown is and his vice president and still… STILL somehow being smarter than the average voter. The bar is on the ground, folks.
If it makes it any better id argue that the average voter at least has the excuse of being propagandized and under educated with minimal ability to improve. These fucks have more than enough money to inprove themselves nearly infinitely but would rather wallow in their egos and call it wisdom.
I feel like if ya sat down with Cletus the Appalachian hillbilly and told him the tale of his names origin he would probably find it interesting at the very least.
with minimal ability to improve.
This is the part I’m still trying to wrap my head around. In the US, almost everyone with a pulse has internet access, and websites like Wikipedia are not blocked or filtered. Obviously you’re right because there are a lot of misinformed people, I just don’t understand how people let that happen to themselves.
To benefit from information, you have to be able to filter out the nonsense. Most people have no baseline to work with and are taken in by anything presented confidently and repeatedly.
Camacho would be a much better president
Camacho at least wabted to make things better and hire a smart person
Musk is our “smart person”
They need some Friendship:
Elonis a highly productive con man. He fooled me when I bought the FSD option on my Tesla in 2019 for $8k. When I sold it, the market only was willing to pay $1500.
Congrats on getting out of the abusive relationship, but may I ask why you believed him in 2019 when it was clear he had been lying and promising FSD for nearly a decade at that point? Were you just not following the news all that closely and took his word at face value? Or was the promise, if it came true, just so tantalizing that you turned a blind eye to the turmoil surrounding Musk? Thanks in advance, I love learning about peoples’ thought processes after they have realized they made a mistake.
I feel like Musk was a symptom of Americans really wanting a genius billionaire to be a real thing as it reinforces this American dream everyone’s dreaming about.
Reading the CPAC transcript clearly shows that he’s currently below average intelligence if anything.
They wanted Iron Man and got Justin Fuckin Hammer.
Phoney Starck
My feelings are that Steve Jobs was the quintessential cultural personality CEO and his early death sent a lot of people desperately looking for the next one, who ended up being Elon.
The difference was that Jobs actually had taste and a good vision for the future. He could build a smart team and let them drive progress then motivate to go further without making things up like Elon. So the media papered over Elon’s wild confabulation, instead of showing him in a true light.
Time has been kind to Mr. Jobs. Read about his early years at Apple… he was famous for skewering anyone that disagreed with him. He also had lovely habits like parking his sports car in handicapped spots so he didn’t have to walk as far. You can’t disagree with his talent for running a company that did an awful lot of innovation, but he wasn’t a nice guy. He named one of his first products, the Lisa after his daughter, but didn’t treat the actual daughter that well.
For a “smart” person, his death was quite possibly a very unintelligent way to go. He basically decided to give all kinds of “holistic” crap a chance to treat his cancer and avoided medical intervention for almost a year. If he had gone with the medical path from the onset, he might still be alive today.
But he did have his moments. Like how he basically told the music industry to cut out the DRM, because it just made the ecosystem impossible. Or one time when someone was picking at him over abandoning OpenDoc in favor of Java (Java didn’t work out either, but his response was on point, without being dismissive of the person).
Cancer sucks. It’s hard to judge someone from dying when everyone dies. I do agree with you that treatment would be better. However finding out you are going to die has a grieving process. He took too long. But I kind of get it.
He also told the daughter it wasn’t named after her for most of her life.
I may be misremembering but I think she wasn’t a child anymore by the time he acknowledged that he was her dad.
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Most of that’s false though. He couldn’t build a good smart team, Wozniak could. He was very good at screwing others out of ownership in the company they helped build though. He was also very good at one thing, envisioning a computer in every home, and a computer in every pocket. That was his one true talent.
But he was not “smart”. He died to cancer detected early enough to heal with modern medicine, but chose quack treatments instead. There really isn’t any such thing as general intelligence. Everyone’s got very specialized knowledge in some topic, and are idiots in everything else.
Jobs was a salesman, Woz the engineering brain.
Na, that is just historically inaccurate. The original Macintosh team collected their stories/memoires at folklore.org, which give you a pretty good overview of his talents. He was really mercurial and Woz was the better engineer, but played a really important role in the vision/design of computers as we know them today. In the original Mac team others did the engineering and Jobs never claimed to be and engineering type of person, but he had a good feel on the importance of design, clear visual metaphors and good interaction design and pushed the team relentlessly into that direction.
He was quite good at marketing. He wasn’t a technical guy and apparently wasn’t terribly good at driving technical people either. But he was great at selling whatever the tech people came up with.
some, like me, are idiots in everything
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Jobs was just as sociopathic as Musk. You have to be to lead any corporation that relies on profit and is public. People that worked closely with Jobs often said he was an arehle and didn’t care about people’s feelings.
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It would be difficult to fire thousands of people if one wasn’t a sociopath, methinks.
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That’s often NOT the case. Executives are looking at their share price each quarter. It’s rarely about the ‘health’ of the corporation.
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Well yeah, that’s the American Dream right? That if you’re smart and work hard, you’ll be rich?
And like most dreams, it just won’t happen in real life.
Yeah and you need to be asleep to believe it
You can have a high IQ and still be an utterly inept moron. I have family in Mensa and they are hands down some of the laziest, stupidest people I know.
Mensa is utterly meaningless and so is any IQ test. We hardly understand how brain works and some think we can evaluate it through some online test and assign a number to it?
Ridiculous and anyone who’d fall for that should buy a bridge from me I have in Brooklyn to become a billionaire by collecting road tax fee, ayy great deal only mensa geniuses would recognize 😆
Oh, I know it’s ridiculous. They took my family member, that’s all I needed to see to realize that.
Leon came from Apartheid driven wealth, which paid for his education, and learned how to suck the US taxpayers dry while firing people left and right. Fuck him and DOGE. What about his brother Kimball who hides behind the curtains?
