The ‘World’s Smartest Man’ Absolutely Hates Me

You might not know his name but YoungHoon Kim, a 36-year-old South Korean man, is loudly claiming to be the smartest man on the planet, with an IQ score of 276. To put this number in perspective: Albert Einstein’s IQ score was, according to contemporary experts, probably somewhere between 240 and 250.

The other thing about YoungHoon Kim is that he hates me.

I believe that I became aware of Kim when I saw his posts on X. Kim loves X. He spends a good deal of energy trying to convince others that he is the most intelligent man on Earth, signing his posts “Highest IQ Man,” “IQ Man,” or even “Dr Highest IQ Man,” the X name he went by until recently. A huge proportion of Kim’s posts are about Elon Musk, whom he treats like a god. Kim calls him “the smartest man in America” and recently composed a song for him. “Elon is our sunlight,” he wrote recently. He also loves Musk’s mum.

If you were basing it solely on his social media output, you might not think Kim had the world’s highest IQ. Some of the brightest people in the world solve complex maths problems and publish groundbreaking research; on March 14, Kim wrote, “Marxism is shit” then misspelled the word ‘highest.’ He has spent recent weeks furiously insisting that he is being persecuted because people—and even Grok, the AI assistant of his beloved Musk—have started to discredit his claims. It is unclear how Kim makes a living, though being the founder of “digital brain healthcare innovator” NeuroStory is the best bet. Kim appears to have studied in England and South Korea, gaining a BA in Theology from Yonsei University and an MSc in Neuroscience/Psychology from King’s College London. For this piece I spoke to various people who have had dealings with Kim over the years, most of whom are suspicious of his claims. One of the few people who thinks Kim is the smartest person on Earth is Kim himself.

“For more than a century, ‘intelligence quotient’ testing has seduced and corrupted, convincing those who achieve high scores that they are special.”

But Kim’s alleged score is so astronomically high that I wanted to find out if he was right. To do that, I had to grapple with a strange phenomenon: The world of the high-IQ society. Did Stephen Hawking have it right when he said, “People who boast about their IQ are losers”?

Kim is by no means the first man to claim to have the highest IQ score in the world. For more than a century, intelligence quotient testing has seduced and corrupted, convincing those who achieve high scores that they are special. The IQ test as we know it was invented in France in 1904, at the behest of the government, by the French psychologist Alfred Binet and his psychiatrist colleague Théodore Simon. It was created initially to evaluate children who might need more help in school. In 1916, at Stanford University, a revised test (the Stanford-Binet) was implemented by the American psychologist and eugenics proponent Lewis Terman. It tests fluid reasoning, general knowledge, memory, visual-spatial processing, and quantitative reasoning, and saw the first use of the numerical score that has come to define the practice.

In the late 1930s, David Wechsler changed the face of IQ testing again when, as chief psychologist of New York’s Bellevue Hospital, he introduced the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). Unlike the Stanford-Binet, the WAIS included non-verbal tasks. It became more popular than the Stanford-Binet by the 1960s and is now often cited as the gold standard. Its most recent iteration, WAIS-5, tests people in five categories—working memory, processing speed, verbal comprehension, fluid reasoning, and visuo-spatial.

There are in the region of 100 high-IQ societies today. The first remains the most famous. Mensa was founded in Oxford in 1946 by barristers Lancelot Ware and Roland Berrill. Initially, Berrill had wanted Mensa meetings to be overseen by a young woman who would sit on a throne, completely naked apart from a leopard skin. Comparatively inclusive, Mensa is open to people who score in the top 2 percent of the population. This translates to IQ scores of approximately 130 and over, but the fact that Mensa has 144,000 members, not 160 million—2 percent of the world’s population—tells you how few people bother to take IQ tests.

That said, people sign up for a wide range of reasons, Mensa’s honorary president Chris Leek told me. “One of the fun things about high IQ is you get members from every walk of life,” said Leek. “Think of a dozen reasons why someone would want to join, and you’ll find them here.”

Antjuan Finch (pictured below) is a 28-year-old American who got into high-IQ testing when he was at school in Virginia. Finch’s score is around 150. “I think there’s probably a little bit of a tendency to be more of a social outcast,” Finch said of the typical member, adding: “The less abnormal people [who score very well on pre-university tests] get tracked into existing regular areas—they become doctors, lawyers, very accomplished professors—instead of being in high-IQ societies, usually.” Leek went further: “I think individuals with neurodiversity can sometimes see some psychological fulfillment through scoring highly in IQ tests, and it can be helpful for them.”

In the 1970s and 80s, high-IQ societies popped up like weeds, each one offering its own test created by people without adequate training in psychometrics or psychology. An expert in this field who wishes to remain anonymous because of Kim’s animosity towards him said, “Self-administered, untimed, non-proctored IQ tests developed without psychometric oversight are not considered valid, reliable psychological instruments and are often non-standardized.” One of the most enduring societies was the Mega Society, founded in 1982 by Ronald Hoeflin, who is now 81. In 1985, Hoeflin released the Mega Test, dubbed “the world’s hardest IQ test.” Eventually this test was abandoned entirely after, according to Hoeflin, “a malicious psychiatrist” posted the answers online.

On one of Kim’s own sites, a “nongovernmental think tank” called United Sigma Intelligence Association (USIA), he claims to have voluntarily resigned from the Mega Society. Various people I talk to say that actually, he was expelled. “My impression is that YoungHoon Kim is a megalomanic, pathologically lying impostor,” said Paul Cooijmans, 60, a Dutch high-IQ expert whose self-made online tests are well-regarded in the high-IQ world.

Kim has ruffled many feathers in this small world. In 1996 Cooijmans founded the Giga Society, to which he claims the admission rate is one in a billion. In 2021 Kim created his own Giga Society, using the moniker without Cooijman’s permission and refusing to stop when Cooijmans asked him. To this day, Kim continues to run this copycat society, having the audacity to call it “the professional and real Giga Society” on his website. Brazilian high-IQ expert Hindenburg Melao Jr, 53, told me, “Kim’s history within high-IQ societies is brief, complex, and not particularly flattering.”

Kim’s USIA also says that the organization “includes Nobel Prize winners and the greatest minds in the world such as Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker…” This attempt to impress by association falsely implies that these thinkers are in any way associated with the organization, when they absolutely are not. USIA claims to have given a “lifetime achievement award” to Richard Dawkins in 2023; another award recipient, the American psychologist Howard Gardner, eventually turned his down, later writing on his blog, “At this point, USIA is best described as a reputational Ponzi scheme.”

Measuring IQ scores at Kim’s alleged level is incredibly unreliable. Melao Jr said, “Estimates of a person’s IQ over 170 are based on the rarity of people who have solved problems as difficult and as numerous as the ones he has solved. No IQ test question comes close to the difficulty of major real-world problems, so they are not suitable for measuring at the highest levels.” By using “diverse real-world problems,” Melao Jr’s Sigma Test Extended purports to be particularly good at measuring IQ scores above 160.

“High-IQ societies are to volatile characters like picnics are to wasps.”

Before Kim began making his own claim to the top spot, it was the California-born Christopher Langan who was hailed as the smartest man on Earth. Made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, Langan, now 73, has an IQ score on which nobody can quite agree. His wife Gina, a clinical neuropsychologist who acts as Langan’s spokesperson, told me that it is higher than 200; most estimates online put it at 190; Melao Jr thought it was around 176.

Despite his extremely high IQ, Langan, who lives on a horse ranch in Missouri, has worked manual jobs for most of his life and never achieved the level of academic recognition one might have expected. As Gladwell pointed out, Langan proves that a high IQ doesn’t guarantee any level of economic or academic success—nor, as we have learned about Langan, does it stop you opposing interracial marriage, threatening your critics on a regular basis, or believing that George Bush masterminded 9/11 in order to distract people from your own “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe.” I am now served regular Langan updates on X, where he is invariably incredibly racist.

High-IQ societies are to volatile characters like picnics are to wasps. This is a world riven with schisms, fraud, racism, and bullying. Before Langan there was Keith Raniere, another American. Raniere, 64, achieved some of the highest scores in the Mega Society, then founded the NXIVM sex cult and went on to be sentenced to 120 years in prison for sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. Kim, a fan of both Donald Trump and Margaret Thatcher, has said that “the climate change ideology is exaggerated”; that trans women shouldn’t use X; that “Different cultures create division, reduce unity, and raise crime rates; and that “Feminism comes from low IQ.”

Over the months I’ve spent looking into Kim’s claims, not a single expert has said they believe he has the world’s highest IQ score. We know, however, that his score is fairly high. I hear from the former chairperson of Mensa Korea that Kim is a member. “I cannot disclose his exact IQ score,” wrote Eunjoo Lee via email. “However, he does not have a special IQ score, at least within Mensa standards.”

“Kim then wrote on X that I look like I have ‘a really low IQ.’”

Kim and I had a brief exchange on X but he then ignored my various attempts to interview him. After a while, he emailed again. “Is there even the slightest intention to damage my reputation?” he asked. “I do not wish to respond to any article that aims to harm my reputation in any way. If the article negatively impacts my reputation, I will take active measures through my X social media to address the matter with my lawyer.” I knew that Kim was defensive in this way. On his profile page on USIA, he threatens “immediate and robust legal action” on anyone who offends him in various ways. He has a history of disparaging his critics and accusing them of supporting sex offenders.

When I explained the situation—that I’d simply like to see proof of his 276 score—he said, “I have no intention of giving popularity to minor individuals who are obsessively stalking me. If I am not the main subject of the article, and if the article is not genuinely promoting me, I will not participate.” He then wrote on X that I look like I have “a really low IQ.”

When I asked again, he replied: “Hey. Listen. If you were a certification body like the Guinness World Records or some brain championships, we could provide it. However, we have no reason to offer you anything confidential. Since we cannot gain any benefit from you, we refuse. Don’t email anymore. You look a malicious stalker. You are not qualified. Okay? Case closed.”

The problem with Kim’s response is that he hasn’t provided any proof to “brain championships” or Guinness World Records. Raymond Keene is president of the World Memory Championships—an organization on which Kim frequently leans to legitimize his score. Despite not seeing any evidence of his score, Keene made Kim the vice-president of the World Memory Championships after Kim contacted him out of the blue. “I’m always interested in supporting people who want to promote IQ,” Keene said. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s on the side of the angels. He’s trying to increase global intelligence and global mental power.” Marek Kasperski, the president of the World Mind Sports Council—organizers of the World Memory Championships—has also never seen any evidence of Kim’s score. (Kim is keen on saying that these organizations are “partnered with Guinness World Records” but Guinness World Records have never mentioned him, let alone corroborated his score.) Keene is also listed on the NeuroStory board, as is Tom Chittenden, who has also never seen any evidence of Kim’s score. Every one of Kim’s supposed organizations links back to another, and always includes the same handful of people. There are fascinating sleights of hand at play; Kim said here that his “high intelligence” has been recognized by bodies including Mensa. This does not mean, however, that Mensa believes that he has an IQ score of 276. On this TV appearance, the production didn’t just blindly believe his claims, it stated that he was the “winner” of the World Memory Championships. He never has been.

Not long after my interaction with Kim I finally saw some of his scores for the first time, thanks to Dr Jason Betts, 53, an Australian who runs the World Genius Directory (“the who’s who of the high-IQ world”). When Kim learned that I wanted to reveal the contents, he said that I did not have permission. But high-IQ experts said it’s not possible to get a score of 276 from the numbers in the document. Even Betts doesn’t believe Kim has an IQ score higher than 175. Chris Leek of Mensa called any attempt to extrapolate 276 “a nonsense”; Cooijmans commented, “I see no justification for him claiming an IQ of 276”; and Antjuan Finch said, “It’s wrong,” estimating from the data that Kim’s real score should be between 160 and 172.

Given that you can’t get 276 from that report, it probably isn’t what Kim is using to support his claim. Indeed, I hear from my anonymous expert that a man called Dr Kirk Raymond Butt scored Kim at 210 on a test called the VNPT-II, and that Kim is probably using that as the basis for his 276. IQ tests rely on a surprisingly complicated measure called standard deviation, which basically means how far you are away from the average taker of that test. One standard deviation for a Mensa test is 15 IQ points. Having scored 210, apparently the highest possible score on Butt’s test, Kim decided to use the unusually high standard deviation of 24—one he claims that Mensa Korea uses—to inflate an already suspicious score. “Converting a score from a standard deviation of 15 to a standard deviation of 24 when you know that the international standard is 15, as well as that most of the tests Mensa Korea accepts and administers don’t use a standard deviation 24, is suspect,” said Finch.

“Kim does not belong to the ranks of the top 1,000 most intelligent individuals alive.”

The VNPT-II test has a sample size of 32 and is therefore almost completely useless. The idea that someone would be using it as the basis for such a grandiose claim is outrageous. Finch said, “No correlations were provided, no internal consistency estimates were given, no factor loadings were referenced, no distribution of scores were shown, and no limitations were alluded to whatsoever. It’s scandalous.” My anonymous expert said, “These metrics exhibit multiple limitations: lack of independent peer review, published psychometric validation, small or undefined normative samples, no published reliability or validity data, potential score inflation at the upper range, marketing-driven visibility of scores, unclear administration procedures, and appeals to authority lacking institutional or academic backing.”

Melao Jr, who thinks Kim’s true score will be around 170, said, “Kim does not belong to the ranks of the top 1,000 most intelligent individuals alive, just like none of the other people who made similar claims before him.” Besides, he added, “Almost all of the 100 most intelligent people alive do not participate in any high-IQ society.”

Despite months of research into Kim, I am no closer to understanding what he really does—apart from self-promotion. As well as worshiping Musk, Kim worships Jesus Christ and has created a Patreon for something he calls the “Highest IQ Church.” There he says, “God has given me the title of the person with the highest IQ, not for my own glory, but to reveal His glory.” Donors are assured that their money will be “used to help neighbors in need of God’s assistance.”

I have learned to be wary of anyone who claims to have an astronomically high score. It has been fascinating to watch Kim spiral over the last fortnight, as once-unchallenged assertions about his IQ score crumble into dust. One of the lessons here seems to be that IQ is an almost impossibly difficult phenomenon to calculate, and that it’s a sad irony that it is least reliable in the upper echelons, where people are the most fascinated. It’s also worth pointing out that we know little to nothing of the IQ scores of the many extraordinary people who have had a seismic impact on our understanding of the world. In fact, as Kim himself wisely said, “Intelligence (IQ) is not a limited concept that can only be measured by an IQ test. Real achievements are also a crucial indicator for estimating IQ.”

I noticed at one point that Kim was also aware of the Hawking quote about people boasting about their IQ being losers. His take on it was as perfect as I could have hoped: “Stephen Hawking once said, ‘People who boast about their IQ are losers.’ But I am the only one who holds the official world record title for the world’s highest IQ person right now.”

Follow Ralph Jones on X @OhHiRalphJones