I have long regarded talk show hosts to be people of superior intelligence, and the great Phil Donahue was no exception. Perhaps no better example of this is when he verbally spared with Ayn Rand. Although Miss Rand was Jewish, and these tend to have branching neurons that give rise to certain genetic diseases like Tay Sachs, Donahue’s brain was twice as large as Miss Rands.

So it was a battle of brain size vs brain branching. This was in 1979, seven years before the even bigger brained Oprah would explode out of nowhere and replace Donahue as the #1 talk show host in America while replacing Miss Rand as the most influential woman on the planet.

Among Rand’s insights were:

• Altruism is evil.
• There is no God because there is no proof, and we are not required, even as a hypothesis, to entertain any idea for which there is no evidence.
• All monopolies are caused by government favours. Without government help it’s impossible to create a monopoly.

Gates vs Musk: Who would Ayn Rand have admired more?

One of the prevailing themes of Ayn Rand’s books is that some men are just supermen who put the rest of us to shame by dominating our capitalist society. Although Bill Gates and Elon Musk are both very brilliant men, Gates is much more brilliant. If you go by their reported SAT scores, Musk is around 140. Gates’s IQ is either 170 or 154, depending on whether you believe he scored in the high or low 1500s on the old SAT (reports vary). Since both men became the richest person in the World in highly g loaded fields, it’s interesting to ask if there’s any reason to expect one genius to be so much smarter than the other.

• For starters, although Musk has far more money than Gates today because he came of age when there was more money, Gates held Forbes annual title of World’s richest human a record 16 times while Musk has so far held the title only twice (in 2022 and 2025) and now that he has pissed off Donald Trump, this year may be his last.
• Gates is nerd (skinny sci-fi fan with glasses) while Musk is a socially maladjusted self-described autist. Gates is a geek while Musk is a freak.
• Musk’s companies were subsidized as are all monopolies according to Ayn Rand. If Gates is the exception to Rand’s rule, he’s almost superior enough to be a different species, and may indeed have a 170 IQ.

Despite Gates being much smarter, Rand hated altruists so she might have despised the Gates foundation and applauded Musk’s demolition of USAID.