Elon Musk names the 'three smartest' people on the planet

Billionaire Elon Musk has named the people he believes are the three smartest individuals in the world.

The controversial X/Twitter owner appeared on the Republican politician Ted Cruz’s podcast, Verdict With Ted Cruz, and gushed about the intelligence of three specific people.

Musk named the Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Google co-founder Larry Page and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as three of the most intelligent people that he knows.

Speaking about Ellison, who between 2018 to 2022 was on the board at Tesla, Musk called him “one of the smartest people” he knows.

As well as their prior work experience together at Tesla, it’s reported Ellison invested $1 million towards Musk’s X/Twitter takeover to help him to buy the social media platform in 2022.

On Google's Page, Musk claimed his achievements in helping to make Google a global tech powerhouse were linked to his intelligence. “To some extent, a smart person is someone who does smart things,” he said.

Their once close personal friendship has reportedly broken down due to their differing views on the direction of artificial intelligence.

Fellow billionaire Bezos was also named dropped by Musk, who commended the Amazon boss’s achievements in business and space exploration with his company Blue Origin.

“Jeff Bezos has tackled many complex and significant challenges,” said Musk.

It’s thought that while the pair are huge business rivals, their relationship may be improving after Musk shared a meme in January this year suggesting the tension was starting to ease between them.

Meanwhile, things aren’t going too well for Musk as people are protesting at Tesla dealerships in the US, and beyond, and X/Twitter was hit with a cyberattack causing a major widespread outage.

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