President Trump says his cabinet is already making history.

On the first day of a long weekend of inauguration celebrations on Thursday, Donald Trump told reporters: “One thing we’ve learned. We have by far the highest IQ of any cabinet ever assembled.”

It’s hard to know whether the property developer and reality TV star who just became the 45th President of the United States was joking. Still, the crowd cheered and burst into applause.

“ Some 13 members of President Obama’s first cabinet attended the most elite colleges in the country versus just six in President Trump’s cabinet. ”

President Obama’s first cabinet in 2008 wasn’t so bad either, as the New York Times pointed out: It included Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist as Energy Secretary, former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council, and former chief executive of the Federal Reserve Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury.

Trump’s cabinet picks are certainly among the richest in recent memory. By some estimates, they’re worth several billions of dollars, including Betsy DeVos, education secretary ($5.1 billion), Wilbur Ross, commerce secretary ($2.5 billion), Steve Mnuchin, treasury secretary ($40 million), Ben Carson, housing secretary ($26 million) and Andy Puzder, labor secretary ($25 million).

And research has shown that wealthy people may indeed have higher IQs, at least judging by some measures. In “Investigating America’s Elite,” Jonathan Wai, a research scientist in psychology and member of Duke University’s Talent Identification Program, looked at the correlation between wealth and brains — or at least, brains as measured by education. (As always, correlation suggests a relationship, but does not mean causation.)

Some 45% of billionaires rank among the smartest 1% of people in the U.S. based on these terms, he concluded. Other groups with high representation in the smartest set: U.S. Senators (41%), federal judges (40%), and Fortune 500 CEOs (39%).

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Wai looked at five groups of America’s business and political elite, totaling 2,254 subjects. The majority of Fortune 500 CEOs, federal judges, billionaires, senators and members of the House of Representatives had attended either a selective undergraduate institution or graduate school, according to his study, which was published in 2013.

And if they attended one of the 29 “elite colleges,” they were considered to be among the top 1%. He chose the schools based on their average SAT scores and American College Test scores, as tracked by the “U.S. News & World Report.” Average SAT scores of 1400 or greater — a combined score on the math and critical reading sections — put a school in the top 1%.

Using this methodology on a smaller sample of Trump and Obama’s first cabinets, 13 members of Obama’s first cabinet attended the elite schools listed in Wai’s research versus just 6 in Trump’s.

Equating intelligence by educational background, of course, is an approach that even the author himself admits has its limitations. In a more recent 2015 paper by Wai, “Investigating the Right Tail of Wealth,” looking at 30 millionaires, the link between ability/education and wealth was relatively small (after controlling for many potential variables).

But, based on his earlier research and because about 45% of billionaires are in the top 1% of ability, judging by Wai’s 2013 paper, that top tier is overrepresented among billionaires by a factor of about 45 to 1. That means, on net, billionaires are likely smarter than the average person.

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However, Steve Siebold, author of “How Rich People Think,” believes formal education has nothing to do with building wealth. A former professional tennis player who coaches Fortune 500 executives on mental toughness — something Hillary Clinton said that Trump lacked during their bitter presidential campaign — Siebold has been interviewing multimillionaires and billionaires since college, and he says many of the world’s wealthiest people have little or no formal education.

IQ and/or math account for a lot in the information age. Science, technology, engineering and math graduates tend to earn more. Microsoft MSFT, -2.35% co-founder Bill Gates and Facebook FB, -0.95% chief executive Mark Zuckerberg got into Harvard because of their high SAT scores, even though they later dropped out, while Trump attended Fordham University in New York — and Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

And Sean Parker — co-founder of file-sharing site Napster and the first president of Facebook — would be among the world’s top technology billionaires. He never went to college. But he was a child programming prodigy.

Others argue that IQ scores only go so far. Joseph Nye Jr., a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense and chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and Harvard University professor, wrote last year that Trump may be undone by emotional intelligence “that allows leaders to channel their personal passions and attract others.”

He wrote: “General IQ tests measure such dimensions of intelligence as verbal comprehension and perceptual reasoning, but IQ scores predict only about 10% to 20% of variation in life success. The 80% that remains unexplained is the product of hundreds of factors playing out over time. Emotional intelligence is one of them.”

What’s more, the Senate confirmation hearings of Trump’s cabinet appointees have not all gone so smoothly. Among them, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, flubbed a key student loan debt figure during a hearing on Jan. 17.

Still, Nye wrote those words two months before Trump won the U.S. presidential election against all (or most) odds. Trump himself has long defended himself against critics who said his temperament lets him down. In 2013, he tweeted, “Actually I’m a very compassionate person (with a very high IQ).”