Patrick Collison's IQ: 152
Patrick Collison
Estimated IQ
152
Known For
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe, polymath entrepreneur
About Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison co-founded Stripe with his brother John in 2010, building it into the world's most valuable private fintech company at a peak valuation of $95 billion. Collison won Ireland's Young Scientist of the Year award at 16, learned multiple programming languages as a teenager, and sold his first startup at 19 before founding Stripe. Beyond business, he is known for his intellectual curiosity across history of science, economics, progress studies, and philosophy — he co-authored an essay with economist Tyler Cowen that helped launch the 'progress studies' field. He reads voraciously across disciplines and interviews leading scholars for his personal learning.
What an IQ of 152 Means
An IQ of 152 for Patrick Collison reflects his high abstract and systems-thinking intelligence. Stripe's technical architecture — the API design that made it trivially easy for developers to integrate payments — required both deep software engineering insight and an unusual ability to think from the developer's perspective rather than the bank's perspective. His co-founding of progress studies demonstrates intellectual curiosity that extends well beyond his immediate business domain, reflecting the broad intellectual interests associated with very high general intelligence.
How Patrick Collison Compares
To understand where this falls on the IQ scale, see our complete IQ score ranges guide, or learn what IQ actually measures.
Famous IQ Comparison
| Person | Estimated IQ | Known For |
|---|---|---|
| Patrick Collison | 152 | Co-founder and CEO of Stripe, polymath entrepreneur |
| Demis Hassabis | 168 | Co-founder of DeepMind, AlphaFold, chess prodigy, neuroscientist |
| Paul Graham | 155 | Co-founder of Y Combinator, Lisp hacker, essayist |
| Ilya Sutskever | 155 | Co-founder of OpenAI, deep learning pioneer, AlexNet |
| Naval Ravikant | 150 | Co-founder of AngelList, philosopher-investor, wealth and happiness thinker |
| Steven Pinker | 154 | The Better Angels of Our Nature, cognitive scientist, linguist |
| Chamath Palihapitiya | 145 | Early Facebook executive, venture capitalist, SPAC pioneer |
See the complete famous IQ list or check what an IQ of 152 means.
Where This Estimate Comes From
- Estimates inferred from documented achievements, including winning Ireland's Young Scientist of the Year award at 16
- He studied at MIT before leaving to build what became Stripe
- No publicly verified test result
Estimate disclaimer: Patrick Collison's IQ figure is a speculative estimate compiled from public sources, not a verified test result. See how we compile these estimates.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Patrick Collison's IQ?
Patrick Collison's IQ is estimated at around 152, reflecting his exceptional technical and synthetic intelligence. He won Ireland's top science prize at 16, sold his first startup at 19, and built Stripe into the world's most valuable fintech company — all while maintaining broad intellectual interests in history of science, economics, and the study of human progress.
What made Stripe's API design revolutionary?
Before Stripe, integrating payment processing into a website required dealing with complex banking relationships, setting up merchant accounts, navigating arcane financial APIs, and writing extensive boilerplate code. Stripe's API reduced this to a few lines of code that any developer could integrate in an afternoon. The design insight was radical: instead of designing for the bank's processes, design for the developer's experience. This developer-first philosophy made Stripe the default payment layer for startups and tech companies worldwide.
What is progress studies and why did Collison help create it?
Progress studies, as articulated by Collison and economist Tyler Cowen in their 2019 Atlantic essay, is the systematic study of why some periods and places produce dramatic accelerations in human welfare and scientific discovery while others stagnate. Collison argues that we know surprisingly little about the conditions that produce great scientific breakthroughs, and that understanding these conditions better could help reproduce them. He funds work in this area through the Stripe Press (which publishes books on science history) and through direct grants to researchers studying scientific productivity and institutional design.
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MyIQScores Editorial Team
Researchers in cognitive psychology, psychometrics & educational science
Last updated
May 10, 2026
All content on MyIQScores is reviewed for scientific accuracy against peer-reviewed research in cognitive psychology and psychometrics. Our editorial team cross-references each article with published literature before publication and updates pages whenever new research warrants a revision.