I'm not sure an academic in mathematics or physics has to deal with such complex and dynamic factors in their daily lives...but they just direct their minds towards solving hard abstract problems.
The amount of shit someone has to deal with at that level of wealth is staggering. I'm not surprised that one needs to have a lot of "processing power" in order deal with that.
hmm had a brief look out of curiosity, which is admittedly more research than I do when writing a comedy piece like this
about 45% of billionaires went to a top 1% school, comparable to judges and senators. a lot of the top silicon valley ceos have IQs estimated to be over 140. Broadly speaking I feel that my estimates were more in line, self made billionaires have IQs closer to 2 standard deviations from the mean (~130), than 4.
People like warren buffet, elon musk, bill gates are among the top of the really well known ones going by my intuition, likely 3 standard devs up from the avg (I feel zuckerberg is a little weaker, and jobs weaker still), and I hazard a guess that real estate moguls, oil and media tycoons etc are generally even weaker. Still, even members of the top group don't give me the feeling that they're at the level of a 'once in a generation' intellect, say for example, your Eulers, Galois, Newtons, von Neumanns etc. Modern day equivalents may be Pearlman or Andrew Wiles, maybe Satoshi and Terrence Tao, while Vitalik definitely falls short.
People in this elite group just don't seem to be motivated by the same incentives as most others. Likewise, I don't get the same vibe from even the best and brightest of the billionaires club, and I like to think I'm quite sensitive to the intelligence of others.
I don't see being massively successful in the world of business requires less intelligence than someone who's massively successful in the world of academia...even if it's in oil, import/export or banking. These things are insanely complicated when you consider their magnitudes, scale and the cost of making mistakes.
Personality traits (based on the Big 5) can also confuse us when it comes to the judging of someone intelligence. He/She may strike us as very intelligent, when in fact, they simply are high on Agreeableness and Openness.
Someone with a very low score of Agreeableness may repel us (aka Steve Jobs) and we would tend to consider him less intelligent because of our aversion to his behaviors.
hmm, perhaps
I don't think I'm discounting jobs due to his personality; i'm not prone to mistaking affability or gregariousness for intellect.
Most of the very smart people I listed would likely score lower in agreeableness and openness than jobs.
I'm not convinced that running a country/multi billion dollar company requires the same level of intelligence as, say, inventing calculus or proving fermat's last theorem. nor are they similar levels of complexity. while its easy to say it's an apples/oranges case, I don't really think they're in the same tier.