This is the new topic du jour on X. The opposing camps roughly fall into people who think that building a $30M app should make you a shoo-in, and people who think that he was rightly rejected based on his personal statement.
I have some sympathy for the first position given that DEI still has to be eradicated, but this is one of those strange circumstances where I'll side with the second. One can set aside the issue of whether a minority with a 1300 SAT got into Harvard in the same cycle, because even if you completely eliminated DEI admits you're still left with far more top-SAT, top-GPA applicants than you have positions.
So what's left? Incredible, elite achievements, but also, the kid sounds like a jerk. First, he brags about how much money he made at each stage of life instead of any way he helped people and disfavorably contrasts his classmates to himself. He follows this up with a one-two combo of a press release for his app plus bragging about not needing college.
Then his moment of euphoria comes when he compares himself to Steve Jobs at a Japanese tourist site where he is hit with a ChatGPT banality from the heavens, complete with 4 hyphens.
Sorry to say it, but the essay sounds like a parody. I'm left to wonder how closely his success story in Silicon Valley parallels Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos. Either way, it's clear that no one, including the kid himself, knows why he wants to go to Harvard.
edit: "my motivation of going to college is just to have a social life." Yeah, a multimillionaire who's mainly interested in catching up his party life does not need college, or vice versa. I second some people's idea that he should just buy an apartment in Boston and start a tech incubator or something.
This is one of those situations where people fall into the false dichotomy trap. People erroneously think many issues are an either/or scenario. In reality, there are more options. Modern people, specifically, have been conditioned by school, history, sports, politics, and media, to think every issue is "blue team vs red team".
On this issue, the correct view is that college should largely be done away with. Pushing every single kid into college has been a massive mistake by Westerners and boomers. But, we know why this was done. To indoctrinate kids, to burden them with mountains of debt, to create useless degrees, to create an ever expanding list of job requirements that used to not be required, to keep liberal and communist professors paid and maintained in useless jobs, to push women into college and the workforce en masse, drastically lowering the birth rate, opening borders and mass immigrating foreigners for cheap labor to do jobs "we don't want to do" (even though our people have done them since the dawn of time), and eroding the most vital jobs our nations are built on, farming, trades, and "dirty" laborious jobs that need to be done, and will always need to be done.