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.
One of the more depressing realizations as you get older is that most people, no matter what side of politics they're on, are actually pretty stupid and gullible overall. We'd like to think that our side is right because we've logically arrived at correct and morally consistent positions after long deliberate thought. While that is true that the right does have the correct positions for those reasons, that is not actually why most people on the right have arrived at them. There are just as many people on the right who feel their way into what they believe, or were just brought up to believe it, or are conversely rebelling against a leftist up brining, or just on this side for the laughs, or any number of other non rational thinking reasons. Just as the left falls into a stratification of a top cabal of actual conniving and scheming manipulators with legions of useful idiot NPCs making up the bulk of their movement, the right has a similar stratification with a core group of people who really have thought it out and arrived at right leaning positions due to rational thought and good morals, while the bulk of the movement around them are basically average normies who are easily led with feel-good displays like truck parades and memes. They are almost accidentally on the correct side. And because they lack the higher level thought processes to digest individual events, policies, and concepts on a rational level, they fall very quickly and easily into just being a mass of 'red team' cheerleaders.
I've long worried that the right has been more and more positioning itself as simply the 'anti-....' party. In that we are simply against things that the left is for, not actually for things for their own sake, that happen to be the opposite of what the left wants. This makes the right very easy to manipulate into being led in one direction or another by anyone shrewd enough to take advantage of it. Simply couch the opposite of what you want as something the left wants, and you get the right to line up for it and cheer without a second thought. And with no underlying bedrock principles of their own to run a self-check on what they're following, there is no way to see it happening from the inside.
An even more depressing thought is that each of us, me included, is not at all immune to this either. No one is actually as smart or rational as they like to think they are. Especially the people who think they are.