Translated from French
I don’t know if you realize what’s happening.
Alex Karp, the head of Palantir, is no longer recruiting his talent from Harvard. He’s training them himself. Young people of 18, without degrees, selected solely on their talent, who code on real projects and read political philosophy between two sprints. He calls it “the Palantir degree.” And today the New York Post headlines that tech companies are launching their own programs because they can no longer rely on the Ivy League.
This isn’t an HR anecdote. It’s a civilizational shift.
For decades, entrepreneurs entrusted universities with the most sacred mission there is: to shape minds. They now understand that this mission has been betrayed. The institutions meant to produce free thinkers are churning out conformists. Merit has been replaced by opaque criteria. Teaching has turned into catechism. Paul Graham saw it before anyone else.
So they’re doing what builders do when a system betrays them. They don’t reform it. They build another one, right alongside.
Elon didn’t wait for NASA to wake up; he created SpaceX. He didn’t reform the media; he bought the public square. Entrepreneurs no longer seek to convince the state. They become the state, wherever the state has abdicated.
Reread Ayn Rand’s *Atlas Shrugged*. We’re there. The bureaucrats keep the titles, the budgets, the buildings. But they’re losing the only thing that matters: trust. In the United States, barely 28% of people still trust the media. A historic low. No one believes those who claim to tell us what to think anymore.
Everywhere you hear that school is over. I think exactly the opposite.
It’s not school that’s dead. It’s the institutions that hijacked it. School, the real one—that of the Athenian Academy, the Renaissance workshops, the master and apprentice—is going to be reborn. More demanding. More just. Without debt, without dogma, without a degree as a lifelong annuity.
A school that will no longer produce graduates, but polymaths. Free minds, capable of coding, thinking, building, and doubting. They’re the ones who will create the value of the next fifty years.
I taught myself to code at 12. No lecture hall taught me what I learned by building. I know what happens to talent when you let it breathe.
The university had centuries to shape the best minds. Entrepreneurs will do it in a decade.
The great rebuilding has begun.
Tech companies launching their own programs to train grads because they 'can't rely' on Ivy Leagues trib.al/Fi2miAG
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