Steve Jobs's IQ: What the Record Actually Shows

The fourth-grade test

The only test result on record for Steve Jobs dates from about 1965, when he was finishing fourth grade. His teacher, whom he called Mrs. Hill, had, in his words, “bribed me back into learning with candy and money”: a math workbook, a giant lollipop and five dollars. Then she had him tested.

Jobs described the outcome in a 1995 oral-history interview for the Smithsonian's Computerworld Honors Program: “they tested me and they decided to put me in high school and my parents said ‘No.’” His parents allowed him to skip one grade. Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography gives the score behind that decision: Jobs tested at the level of a high school sophomore, and the school proposed moving him ahead two grades.

Jobs did not remember the promotion fondly. “I found skipping one grade to be very troublesome in many ways,” he said in the same interview. Neither he nor his biographer ever reported a numerical IQ.

The 160 estimate and its correction

The number most often attached to Jobs, 160, matches a calculation published on November 7, 2011, a month after his death. Jonathan Wai, a psychologist who studies gifted students and wrote a Psychology Today column, took Isaacson's account and applied the old ratio formula: mental age divided by chronological age, times 100.

A fourth grader is 9 or 10. A high school sophomore is 15 or 16. That yields a range from 150 (15 divided by 10) to 178 (16 divided by 9). Wai concluded that Jobs likely had “an IQ roughly 160 or above.” After a reader objected, he added a correction: ratio scores are not the same as the deviation scores used today, and a ratio 160 corresponds to roughly 150 on the modern scale, near the 99.9th percentile.

That correction is the key. Ratio IQs spread out at the extremes, so they overstate rarity compared with modern tests. The general problem is explained in our guide to historical IQ estimates. The most defensible reading of the evidence sits near IQ 150, with a wide error band, because the underlying test, its norms and the exact score were never published.

“Not exceptionally” smart: the biographer's view

Isaacson, who wrote the authorized biography with Jobs's cooperation, reached a different conclusion. He put it bluntly in October 2011: “Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.” He meant that Jobs's power lay in intuition and in joining art to engineering, rather than in the kind of analytical processing he associated with Bill Gates.

Wai's analysis was a direct reply, arguing that the fourth-grade result showed conventional intelligence of a very high order. The two views are less opposed than they look. A child who tests six grades ahead has strong reasoning ability. An adult who reshapes several industries needs judgment, taste and persistence that no test samples. Both can be true of the same person.

The work that makes the case

Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland in September 1972 and dropped out after one semester. He stayed to audit classes, including calligraphy. In his June 12, 2005 commencement address at Stanford, he said the lessons came back a decade later when Apple designed the Macintosh: “It was the first computer with beautiful typography.”

• 1974: hired by Atari as a technician in February.
• April 1, 1976: founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.
• April 1977: Apple II introduced.
• 1984: Macintosh launched on January 24.
• 1985: named, with Wozniak, among that year's recipients of the National Medal of Technology, cited “for their development and introduction of the personal computer.” He left Apple in September and founded NeXT.
• 1986 to 1995: bought the computer-graphics group that became Pixar; Toy Story followed in 1995.
• 1997 to 2010: returned to Apple and led the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.

In 2022 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously.

Jobs, Gates and the question of who was smarter

The rivalry with Bill Gates invites a head-to-head. The evidence does not support one. Gates is widely reported to have scored 1590 of 1600 on the SAT; Jobs left a childhood grade-level result. The two measures differ in age, content and scale. The Gates vs. Jobs comparison sets out their careers instead.

The same limit applies to Elon Musk, whose only documented test data are SAT scores reported by Isaacson in his later biography, and to Thomas Edison, the earlier inventor-entrepreneur Jobs is often measured against. See Jobs vs. Edison for that pairing.

What a score cannot record

The skills most often credited to Jobs are editing and integration: deciding what to leave out, and making hardware, software and design serve one purpose. The Macintosh typography story shows the pattern. A calligraphy class he audited after dropping out of Reed became a product decision a decade later. Jobs explained the logic at Stanford: “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

IQ tests reward fast, accurate reasoning on problems with one right answer. Product judgment works on problems with no answer key. Jobs's record suggests he was strong at the first and unusual at the second. Only the first can be scored.

How we weighed the evidence

Jobs was born in 1955, three decades after Catharine Cox published her 1926 estimates of historical geniuses, so no Cox figure exists. We used his own 1995 account, Isaacson's biography as quoted by the Hechinger Report and Psychology Today, and Wai's published arithmetic, including his correction. We report about 150 as the best-documented estimate and label it as such. It is not a measured score. For how deviation scores are built, see how IQ is measured; to test yourself, try our practice IQ test, a screener rather than a clinical instrument.

Editorial standard: IQ figures for historical figures are retrospective estimates and are labeled as such; scores for living people appear only when the person disclosed them or a reputable outlet reported them. Corrections: contact the editors.