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At an FT event a few years ago, Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates was asked what painful lessons he had learnt when building his software company. His answer startled the audience back then and is all the more resonant today.

Gates replied that in his early twenties he was convinced that “IQ was fungible” and that he was wrong. His aim had been to hire the smartest people he could find and build a corporate “IQ hierarchy” with the most intelligent employees at the top. His assumption was that no one would want to work for a boss who was not smarter than them. “Well, that didn’t work for very long,” he confessed. “By the age of 25, I knew that IQ seems to come in different forms.” 

Those employees who understood sales and management, for example, appeared to be smart in ways that were negatively correlated with writing good code or mastering physics equations, Gates said. Microsoft has since worked on blending different types of intelligence to create effective teams. It seems to have paid off: the company now boasts a market value of more than $3tn and will celebrate its 50th birthday next year.

Gates may have learnt that lesson early. But while many of his fellow US tech billionaires share his original instinct about the primacy of IQ, few appear to have reached his later conclusion. There is a tech titan tendency to believe that it is their own particular form of intelligence that has enabled them to become wildly successful and insanely wealthy and to champion it in others.

Moreover, they seem to think this superior intelligence is always and everywhere applicable. 

The default assumption of successful founders seems to be that their expertise in building tech companies gives them equally valuable insights into the US federal budget deficit, pandemic responses, or the war in Ukraine. For them, fresh information plucked from unfamiliar fields sometimes resembles God-given revelation even if it is commonplace knowledge to everyone outside their bubble. One young American tech billionaire, a college dropout who had just returned from a trip to Paris, once asked me with wide-eyed wonder whether I had heard about the French Revolution. It was incredible, apparently.

Inevitably, this leads to questions about the fungibility of Elon Musk’s IQ given his omnipresence in the US economy and now politics. The South African-born entrepreneur is blessed with an exceptional form of intelligence and clarity of vision that commands respect, even from his fiercest competitors. “I think he’s a fucking legend,” the chief executive of one rival electric vehicle company told me, even though he was personally appalled by the ways in which Musk had used his social media company X as a propaganda tool.

Although Musk excels at building cool cars and rocket ships, his personal brand extension into social media is flailing and he is facing a user and advertiser exodus at X. Still, Musk used the $44bn megaphone he bought to help elect Donald Trump. In turn, the incoming US president has now invited the “super genius” Musk to become one of two co-heads of the planned Department of Government Efficiency. 

To cut bureaucracy, Musk is advertising for “super high IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting”. Musk has already said he would like to axe three quarters of the federal government’s 400 departments. “99 is enough,” he posted.

These days, Musk prefers to troll Gates rather than listen to him. Yet he might still reflect on Gates’s painful lesson: the smartest people in one field do not always have the best ideas in others.

No doubt there is massive bureaucratic waste to be cut, but it will take many different types of intelligence to understand all the public benefits, competing agendas and conflicting interests surrounding government spending. 

There is also a certain irony in tech billionaires trumpeting superior human intelligence when they are also developing AI that may one day overtake it. Google’s co-founder Larry Page labelled Musk a “speciesist” for defending human intelligence so doggedly in the face of advancing technology. 

Naturally, Musk is working on a solution: he plans to upgrade our biological wetware using electronic brain implants developed by his company Neuralink to merge human and machine intelligence.

That prospect will terrify many but may, in a different way, prove the ultimate test of whether human IQ is fungible.

john.thornhill@ft.com

There was a refrain we heard again and again from the seven Black women NPR talked with for this story.

“It is exhausting,” says Venita Doggett, who lives in Memphis, Tenn., and works for a nonprofit doing education advocacy.

“We’re tired. We’re damn tired,” another woman told us. She asked NPR not to use her name because she works in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at a public university in Minnesota, and she fears that a lot of people who work in and around DEI are being targeted right now.

This feeling of being under threat as a Black person, as a woman, and especially as a Black woman feels non-stop, she says, even before the presidential election.

“On November 6th, I was exhausted. I didn’t realize how much it felt like I was holding my breath.”

According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of Black women are Democrats or lean that way. Black women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in high numbers this year; exit polls show their support at over 90%. Now, many of them are grieving the loss of a candidate who would have been the nation’s first Black, female president. At the same time they are bracing themselves for what might happen under the second presidency of Donald Trump.

The woman from Minnesota says there’s constant pressure to engage politically, an unrelenting narrative that Black women will save democracy. But she asks, who is going to save Black women?

“Thinking about this demand of Black women to step up to the plate and do this work always without wavering. And I’m, you know — there’s going to be some wavering.”

Venita Doggett in her backyard garden in Memphis, Tenn., on Nov. 26.

Ariel J. Cobbert for NPR

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She says she’s found herself pulling back a little after the election, spending time with her family, with her community, and with herself.

“In a world that often boxes us in and beats us down, we can’t act like we’re not bruised,” she says. “We have to take care of ourselves. We have to tend to our wounds.”

“You definitely hate Black women”

Doggett went to sleep early on election night. She says she just didn’t want to watch.

“I got up and saw the headline that he had won, that Trump had won. And I was just despondent,” Doggett says.

“I also told my advocate friends that I had the audacity to hope, and I am mad at myself for having it.”

“Wednesday evening, I broke.” She says Trump winning the popular vote felt personal.

“I just thought, like, you definitely hate Black women,” she says, referring to the many people who voted for Trump, and against Harris. “You really hate us. Us, who essentially birthed the nation literally out of our bodies — snatched children out of our wombs to build the U.S.”

But it’s not just Black people she’s worried about now, she says. A lot of her teenage daughter’s friends come from immigrant mixed-status families, and with Trump’s plans for mass deportations, she says she is terrified for them.

“Is that the legacy of fear that we want to impart upon people,” she asks. “And why are we okay with it?”

Grief, betrayal and moving forward

“I probably really have not processed the grief yet,” Bonita Buford says. Buford is the CEO of the Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture in Charlotte, N.C.

“Maybe it’s hope that I’m mourning,” she says. “Maybe it was a little kind of disappointment in humanity.”

Buford says she also feels betrayed, especially by white women voters.

Bonita Buford, President of the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture, stands for a portrait at the Gantt Center on Nov. 26 in Charlotte, N.C.

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“When you think about white women specifically, who were voting early and talking about, you know, ‘well, I voted for her… I’m not going to tell my husband.’ So, were those all lies?” she asks.

According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research, 53% of white women voters picked Trump this year. The same poll showed more Latinos and Black men also voted for him than in previous elections. Still, the majority of Latinos and Black men voted for Harris.

Buford says right now she’s focusing on what she can do. She says her work leading a Black arts organization is more important than ever. Art can disarm people, she says.

“I sometimes say it’s a sneaky way to make change.”

Doggett says as a Black woman, it sometimes does not feel like she has time to rest, let alone grieve.

She fears Black women and other historically marginalized communities will be most impacted by Trump and his allies’ proposed policies, from education to policing.

“There’s just a lot of burnout.”

She says she is turning to family and friends to recharge. She’s thinking about what outfit she will wear to a “friendsgiving,” and about which show to binge watch over the holiday.

“I spent a lot of time in my garden,” Doggett says. “I don’t know any other place except to find solace in the world that, you know, the land — that has given birth to us all. “

“At the end of the day, if there’s still some light out, I’ll go outside and just sit and stare at the flowers.”

NPR producer Walter Ray Watson contributed reporting.

Sequoia Capital’s former China unit has accelerated its push for global deals, investing in celebrity-backed start-ups such as Kylie Jenner’s Vodka seltzer company, as it struggles to deploy its $9bn cash pile in a sluggish domestic market and tightening US controls.

HongShan, which split off last year from one of the world’s largest venture capital firms amid rising geopolitical tensions, has ratcheted up its hunt for deals in Europe and North Asia after facing shrinking options in China.

The Chinese investment group has done deals with celebrity-backed consumer groups such as Jenner’s Sprinter, one of the US reality TV star’s newest business ventures, as well as French women’s fashion brand Destree, co-founded by Géraldine Guyot, the wife of LVMH founder’s son Alexandre Arnault, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

The global push comes as HongShan, led by billionaire Neil Shen, widely considered China’s top tech investor, has faced frustration from some limited partners over the pace of dealmaking for its $9bn US fund, after raising the money two years ago.

HongShan has both dollar and renminbi funds, which are managed by overlapping teams, but they are increasingly having to pursue separate strategies. The group, which closed a fresh Rmb18bn fund in March, is free to use this money to invest in hot areas in Chinese tech such as robotics and generative artificial intelligence.

“They are deploying the US fund but very slowly,” one limited partner told the Financial Times.

HongShan has invested only 10 to 20 per cent of its two later-stage funds, both sized at $3.6bn, according to two people familiar with the matter. This gives it four to five more years to invest the remaining sum.

The group has been quicker in deploying its earlier stage funds, the seed and venture funds, which are $480mn and $1.3bn, respectively — and have between 20 and 35 per cent invested, these people added. 

The lack of high-growth domestic investment options has been exacerbated by Washington’s move to tighten scrutiny of American investment in Chinese high-end technology.

In August, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to ban US investment in Chinese technology with potential dual-use military application, such as semiconductors, quantum computers and AI.

Chinese funds have already pre-emptively been carving out their US LPs from deals that involve high-tech investments, according to industry insiders, leaving them with fewer promising sectors to back as less sensitive consumer companies have been hit hard from the weak economy.

HongShan has instead been using its USD funds to double down on already well-established Chinese start-ups, including building up its position in ByteDance, while buying existing shares in the fast-growing Instagram-like start-up Xiaohongshu.

In general, LPs are keen to see early deployment because it gives more time for the companies to grow in value and for the funds to recoup their investment through IPOs or mergers. LPs typically still have to pay management fees on capital that has not yet been called.

Other US backers of HongShan are more sanguine about the pace of dealmaking. “I’ve been an investor with Neil and the team from the beginning. They are one of the best investments that we’ve made,” said one, adding that HongShan’s push for global deals was a “natural evolution” for a firm of its size and track record.

HongShan is focusing more on Northern Asia and Europe after facing difficulties with US tech deals. This year it was asked to dramatically reduce its stake in HeyGen, a leading AI video company that originated in Shenzhen before migrating to Los Angeles, over national security concerns about Chinese VCs being a significant shareholder, the Financial Times reported.

In recent months HongShan has opened a London office, hiring former Goldman Sachs banker Taro Niggemann, who is charged with hunting for internet and consumer-related deals in the UK and Europe.

The move puts it in more direct competition with its former partner Sequoia, which also has an office in London focused on European start-up investments.

HongShan said: “Since our inception in 2005, we’ve built a diverse portfolio spanning Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia and Europe, proving our strategy thrives across global markets in addition to our portfolios in China.”

The Chinese investment group is hunting for consumer brands in the west, which it can help grow in Asia, as it looks to build on the success of its 2021 investment in Ami Paris, which helped the French designer brand expand in China.

HongShan participated in a $430mn fundraising round earlier this year in UK online bank Monzo, alongside CapitalG, Google’s venture fund GV and Tencent. It also invested this year in the German-based Green Energy Origin, a battery materials start-up.

It also holds a roughly 9 per cent stake in fast-fashion company Shein, which is targeting a London listing if it receives approval from regulators in Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

HongShan also has plans to open a Tokyo office, according to two people familiar with the matter, although one cautioned it was still in the early stages. HongShan declined to comment on its Tokyo office plan.

Its push into Japan follows a rush of other Chinese funds building a presence there, including rival PE group Hillhouse and the Jack Ma-backed Yunfeng, which have both built a presence in the country in recent months for real estate deals.

In Japan, HongShan has invested in construction management software start-up ANDPAD, AI contract management start-up LegalForce and lithium-ion battery venture AESC, according to one person with direct knowledge of the matter. 

Additional reporting by Ryan McMorrow in Beijing