“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould

Maybe inspired by this quote?

This is why, in my opinion, billionaires are incredibly stupid.

By hoarding wealth and forcing people to live paycheck-to-paycheck, with little-to-no time for self improvement or leisure. With few resources to devote towards education or career-building, you are strangling the pool of people who could make your life better. Who could find the cure for whatever illness finally gets you. Who could invent something you’d never have thought of that will improve your quality of life.

Before the pace of modern technology I can kind of get the impulse, but modern billionaires are operating on rules of ‘how to win’ from 100 years ago. They are – by any metric – not only socially backwards, but fundamentally stupid. They are too dumb to even get being greedy right.

Eh. This kinda breezes over what made Einstein into Einstein.

Access to education, a network of peers doing cutting edge research, and a journal of record to publish into was what separated Einstein from the assorted Very Smart Guys around the world.

Consider, as a counterpoint Srinivasa Ramanujan, a genius mathematician who pioneered whole fields of number theory before his death at the age of 32. He is remembered today primarily in his correspondence with a Cambridge University professor, G. H. Hardy. and the notebooks of mathematical proofs he had assembled in his spare time.

What made Ramanujan significant was not merely his genius but his access to the academic record. In the modern era, we have dramatically expanded the reach of academic institutions. So even if you are born in a small town to totally unknown parents living provincial existences, you can access universities more easily now than before.

I might say that the real question is how all this mental horsepower is being used. The modern Einstein likely isn’t lost on a deserted road shuttling around firewood. S/he is more likely optimizing some algorithm to make the next great shitcoin or tunning the performance of the graphics rendering for the new Marvel movie.

Being good at something isnt determined at birth.