Hard working? Lucky? No, billionaires are just smarter than everyone else

The success of billionaires may be down to more than just hard work and good luck - they may also be smarter than most, according to a study.

About 45 per cent of billionaires are in the top one per cent for brainpower, says Jonathan Wai of Duke University.
He says that the top one per cent of wealthy people and the top one per cent for brainpower strongly overlap, reports CNBC.

That ranks them as smarter than US senators and federal judges, of whom 41 per cent are in the top one per cent for cognitive ability, and Fortune 500 CEOS at 38.6 per cent.

Only 21 per cent of the US House of Representatives were considered to be that smart.
However, the study only judges brainpower by whether someone attended one of 29 elite - and often expensive - American colleges, using the colleges' admissions criteria of high academic grades to decide if someone is intelligent.

The study found that 88 per cent of billionaires graduated from college, though a lack of degree did not get in the way of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg making his billions after dropping out of Harvard.

Among members of the Forbes 400 list of America's wealthiest people, Charles and David Koch, co-owners of Koch industries, took degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while investor Warren Buffett graduated from UPenn and Columbia.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Harvard while Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met as PhD students at Stanford.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer went to Harvard while his boss Bill Gates dropped out of the same university, and Amazon found Jeff Bezo attended Princeton.

Those who made their fortunes through investments or technology were more likely to be in the top one per cent for brainpower than those who did from fashion and retail or food and drink.

Some 69 per cent of investment billionaires and 63 per cent of technology magnates are represented in the top one per cent, while only a quarter of fashion earners and 23 per cent of food and drink billionaires make the grade.