This entire post was just to highlight that his wife went to Harvard.

All jokes aside, I think it’s a meaningful question to think about in terms of all the potential that has been lost to the financial industry. Though, if say, these smart people had gone to Google instead, would that have made any real difference?

I think being in the Stanford engineering ecosystem has been a positive funnel into starting a tech company. Whereas in NYC it’s more likely you’d get recruited by a finance company.

I don’t know much about the inner psychology of Elon Musk, but I wonder what would happen if he had started his career out of college working at an investment bank or a hedge fund. Even with his endless ambitions and truly disruptive ideas, would he forego the paycheck to pursue those ideas? I have no idea what the answer to that question is. However, I do see this dynamic of golden handcuffs preventing talented people from venturing out to work on their own projects all the time.

Thought this was an interesting question.