It kinda is, at least I'd say a rich person is on average more intelligent than a poor person.
Increased levels of stress, reduced consumption of healthcare, fewer education opportunities, higher likelihood of being subjected to trauma, and so forth paint a picture of correlation between wealth and cognitive functionality.
People really don't like the "they're not, they just got lucky" statement and will do a lot of things to rationalize it away lol.
The comparison was clearly between the rich and the poor. We can take the 99.99th wealth percentile, where billionaires reside, and contrast that to a narrow range on the opposite side of the spectrum. But, in my opinion, the argument would still hold even if it were the top 10% vs bottom 10% (or equivalent by normalised population).
Intelligence is not a singular pre-requisite to wealth or “to be rich”.
People can specialize in being intelligent, educated, well read, and more - while still being poor.
And we know that most entrepreneurs fail, which is why VCs function the way they do.
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation...