Three decades ago, in 1993, a study conducted by Psychology professor Peter Borkenau from the University of Bielefeld in Germany had found that an individual’s capacity to communicate effectively and articulately was a lasting indicator of intelligence. Today, a language analysis of 100 American executives has identified the most brilliant tech leaders both within and outside of Silicon Valley.
According to a language analysis by Brookline, Massachusetts-headquartered e-learning platform Preply, billionaire business magnate Elon Musk is not the most intelligent tech executive in the United States.

“The way a person uses language is among the clearest indicators of intelligence. Their command over a vast vocabulary, their adeptness at employing nuanced phrases, and the complexity of their sentence structures all illuminate depth of thought and understanding,” the Preply report says.
The platform said that they conducted an in-depth analysis of the transcripts from public appearances by various chief executives, with each transcript scored out of a possible 100 points.

The speeches were analysed for 60 to 180 minutes of dialogue for each executive.

The platform looked at vocabulary breadth, vocabulary sophistication, textual readability, critical thinking and contextual relevance of the speech of the respective tech executives as defining criteria of their analysis.

Who is the smartest tech CEO?
According to the aforementioned analysis by Preply, Demis Hassabis of Artificial Intelligence company DeepMind with a score of 87.33 leads the pack among 100 tech leaders active in the United States.

Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone (74.33), ace investment strategist Warren Buffet (74.00), David Solomon of Goldman Sachs (71.33) and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (71.00) were placed right next after DeepMind CEO in the list of most intelligent tech leaders.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia (70.33), Reed Hastings of Netflix (70.00), Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms (69.67) and Bob Iger of Disney (69.33) were placed sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth in the list, respectively.

Elon Musk’s rank
Elon Musk was ranked 16th in the list of most intelligent tech leaders with an intelligence score of 64.33.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman was ranked 34th (59.33) while former Twitter (now X) CEO Jack Dorsey was ranked 81st with an intelligence score of 45.33.

Among Indian-origin tech leaders in the United States, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayan was ranked 27th (61.33), followed by Vas Narasimhan of Novartis at 29th place (61.00) and Sandeep Mathrani of WeWork at 30th place (60.77).

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella was ranked 36th (59.00) while IBM’s Arvind Krishna was ranked at 48th place (55.00).