Musk Proposes Requiring Cognitive Tests for Presidents

Reacting to news that President Joe Biden will not take a cognitive test during his annual physical examination, billionaire Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday that passing such a test should not be optional for the leader of the free world.

Biden, 81, the oldest-serving U.S. president, has shown signs of cognitive decline. Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents said a reason Biden wasn’t being charged was because at a trial, Biden “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. … It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his 80s — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

“Passing a basic cognitive test should not be optional for someone who controls the nuclear football!” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns.

Musk also posted “!” after someone replied to his post that on his inauguration day, Biden at 78 was older than any president who finished his last term. Ronald Reagan was 77 when he left office in 1989.

Musk’s post echoed comments by Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who last year said mental competency tests should be given to any public official over age 75. Haley has also chided former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, about being “confused” at times during speeches and in posts on Truth Social.

Trump, 77, who got Haley mixed up with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., during a rally in January, posted on Truth Social in November that Biden should take a cognitive test and boasted about a recent physical exam of which he said his health was “excellent” and his cognitive faculties were “exceptional.”

If Trump wins the presidential election in November, he also would be 78 on inauguration day.