I would make a distinction here. They are Elite, which is good. They are the top echelon of their profession. They are also Elitist, which is the real problem h

I would make a distinction here. They are Elite, which is good. They are the top echelon of their profession. They are also Elitist, which is the real problem here. tl;dr... in my personal experience, TED is snobby, and pretentious. I share space with a few TED fellows on a daily basis. They seemed like nice guys but after a short period of time I got the message that they were an exclusive club and I wasn't allowed in. I realize these people are ridiculously smart and sometimes that is correlated with being socially awkward, but a times they were simply rude. I really wanted to like these people but they made it very hard. Eventually, I stopped trying to be nice and stopped acknowledging them all together. They seemed quite fine with that. (They began to seem like divas to me.)