People used the association with the elite institutions as a substitution for any sort of analysis about their strategy or actual credentials. It's not that the

People used the association with the elite institutions as a substitution for any sort of analysis about their strategy or actual credentials. It's not that the association caused the issue, but it allowed these people access to people and money they normally would never have. You aren't more likely to be a crook if you have parents who are professors at MIT, but your scams are more likely to be successful and people are less likely to use common sense because they are more likely to accept things they don't understand if they perceive someone as smarter than them. Something similar happened with LTCM, which brought together multiple Nobel laureates in economics only to go bankrupt 3 years after its founding.