From experience, most of them would have discarded their own founders' CVs.

Which companies are the coveted ones? Off the top of my head, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon happily hire people without degrees. Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs also do it. The lucrative private companies I can honestly think of that really won’t consider it are usually small and discreet, not well known and widely pursued.

You still need to pass the interview hazing, and structurally you won’t be “inducted” the same way new graduates are. But if you have prior experience most of these companies will take a look. Even recruiters contact people without degrees. In particular, back when Laszlo Bock was in charge of recruiting at Google he’d routinely say they hired non-graduates because none of their interviewing metrics appeared to have a strong correlation with employee success.

The companies you mention may in theory, but when a hundred resumes (coveted co/pos) show up guess who's go in the trash first? (With a friend on the inside it is different.)

In LA, it's JPL, SpaceX, Hulu, etc. I've applied at all these for jobs with twenty years experience and my resume doesn't last an hour in their system. Even had a previous job in aerospace at Rockwell.

Sure but does this have anything to do with a strict educational requirement or a practical requirement to somehow reduce the candidate pool? I have put out public job requests and had literally thousands of applicants. I have at times picked a lot of arbitrary methods for reducing the candidate pool to something useful.

They’d probably prefer to think the first, but the second is more likely given all the folks under employed these days.