5 ms·

Charlie Munger applied to Harvard Law School and was rejected because he didn't have an undergraduate degree. But then his dad's friend called the dean of admis

Charlie Munger applied to Harvard Law School and was rejected because he didn't have an undergraduate degree. But then his dad's friend called the dean of admissions, and suddenly they changed their mind.[1] The rules don't apply to the wealthy. It's their world, you're just living in it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Early_life_and_...

paulpauper 4y ago
The rules don't apply to the wealthy. It's their world, you're just living in it. By that logic SBF should be chilling still in the Bahamas , having paid off the authorities
- britneybitch 4y ago
  SBF only had paper wealth. His political donations totaled tens of millions (iirc). On this scale that's a rounding error. To paraphrase Chris Rock, SBF was rich, but Charlie Munger is wealthy.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    He was a highly privileged kid, son of Stanford professors / attorneys, worked for Jane Street, raised a couple billion in capital and would have stayed a billionaire if he just hadn't stolen from his customers. FTX by itself was worth billions without the degenerate Alameda trading strategies being deployed against their own clients.
    - largepeepee 4y ago
      Problem is Alameda was needed by FTX as a market maker. Alameda was over 50% of the trades and often the counterparty of the others. It is a scam in the end, FTX will die without Alameda.
  - ideamotor 4y ago
    This debate makes zero sense. You are both arguing where some extremely binary line is placed in society. If this how you all think about everything?
  - hinkley 4y ago
    A really cynical view of the world is that the rags to riches story is something the power structure tolerates because it 1) brings in a little fresh blood to replace families that self destruct and to give them something else to gossip about and 2) the token successes are an opiate for the masses. The moment they lose all hope head will roll. Most days I try not to think this way but some days it’s difficult to avoid. Someone else said the problem was that SBF stole from his customers. And while it’s true that this is often sufficient to bring you down, it’s often only when you steal from the powerful that the wheels of justice turn so swiftly. He’s being made an example.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > only when you steal from the powerful that the wheels of justice turn so swiftly SBF stole nothing meaningful from anyone powerful.
      - leereeves 4y ago
        He did something worse: he embarrassed them.
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > he embarrassed them Who is “them”? There is no serious power embarrassed by FTX. The seriously powerful never got close enough to be tarnished.
        richbell 4y ago
        I think the closest you'd get is Larry David, Kevin O'Leary, and Tom Brady. Wealthy but definitely not anyone of serious power or consequence.
        leereeves 4y ago
        That may be true, but perception matters, and a lot of virtual ink has been spent on his political ties, donations, contributions to regulation, and meetings with government officials, all the way up to the White House. Powerful people are acting quickly to publicly distance themselves from him.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  He robbed other rich people, cancels it out.
- lefrenchy 4y ago
  He made other rich people lose money, that’s a no no.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- largepeepee 4y ago
  Well SBF pissed off too many wealthier people and was too obvious in his infinite money scam. Munger at least has proved himself many times and has the history to show it. Poor comparison.
pembrook 4y ago
Yes, like 80 years ago. Nobody would accuse Ivy League schools of being bastions of fairness. We all know nepotism & pay-for-play is a core part of their business model. But I'm not sure you could get away with that today. You'd have to make a sizable 'donation' instead.
- jackmott 4y ago
  And now we still live under the thumb of billionaires made by those acts 80 years ago, and he insults the youth for complaining about it to.
- csa 4y ago
  > But I'm not sure you could get away with that today. As long as an applicant meets the minimum/lower-end standards for admissions, Ivy League professors in grad schools (law, mba, and PhD-track… not sure about medicine)can and do make by-name requests for admissions that are best not ignored.
- darth_avocado 4y ago
  You pretty much get away with it even today.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  and they shouldn't be expected to be fair Ivy League schools survived for 300 years before a couple decades of the general public thinking that they need Ivy League, due to the corporate sector’s inability to screen a larger working population Ivy League schools will survive this meme too. Academia as a whole has never adjusted to the underclass’ need to learn for the purpose of making money, they teach irrelevant theory for the sole pursuit of knowledge to this very day They are for the wealthy to connect with each other and build rapport with each other The rest of us are just … around
raincom 4y ago
Today, the wealthy play a different game than what Charlie's dad did. If you belong to the right group (wealth, political connections, power, etc), if you can give $5M donation, you can get into Harvard.
melling 4y ago
Buffett applied to Harvard and was rejected. He did ok. https://inshorts.com/m/en/amp_news/warren-buffett-was-rejected-by-harvard-business-school-1472553825956 https://inshorts.com/m/en/amp_news/warren-buffett-was-reject...
majani 4y ago
The Ivies only recently became places for the smartest students to go. In the beginning they were openly just rich kid schools, like Le Rosey and Eton today.
- scottyah 4y ago
  Taking capable youth, imprinting them with love for you while enabling them to become rich is a lot better business model than taking in kids whose parents have generational money and asking for some of it.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    No it isnt. It’s what you want and little else
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  Rich WASPs - they did discriminate against minorities (Jews in particular) for the longest time, and still continue to do so. Elite schools feeding the powerful and elite companies / institutions with good ol' boys has always been quite symbiotic.
ajra 4y ago
He didn’t have an undergraduate degree because he dropped out of college to serve in the military during WW2, and then graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law. Yes, his family connections certainly helped, but it’s hard to say he wasn’t deserving of a place.
- tenpies 4y ago
  Also worth noting that practicing law in the US, even today, does not require an undergraduate. That requirement is purely a result of academia being academia and eagerly wasting 4 years of people's lives for the sake of not finding a better way to filter people. In most states, to pass the bar, you only need a Juris Doctor which is usually received upon graduating from law school. In some states you don't even need this, and in some others you can skip law school entirely by studying under a judge or practicing attorney[1]. Law, especially in the US, is much more like a trade that accidentally ended up being taught by the universities, instead of a trade school separate from academia. Very similar to medicine in that regard, where again, there is no need for an undergraduate degree to practice medicine. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_bar_in_the_United_States#Educational_requirement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_bar_in_the_Un...
  - vajrabum 4y ago
    No need for an undergraduate degree to practice medicine? Well perhaps not but if you look at the list of classes required to enter most medical schools, and the content of the curriculum most anybody is going to be hard pressed to get in, much less get through it without something pretty close to an undergraduate major in biology or chemistry.
- crossroadsguy 4y ago
  Then how would you say he was not deserving of the place? OP apparently isn’t talking about the subject’s brilliance or so. I think the OP is talking specifically about the rule bending for the rich. > … his family connections certainly helped, but … Put few people with similar background — except the socioeconomic part of their backgrounds in the same situation and see whether they would have made it. I doubt it. So, I’d say you can omit the “but”.
SnowHill9902 4y ago
Nobody said that Harvard is fair.
pinewurst 4y ago
Not so much wealthy as being connected. I used to work with someone admitted to Stanford grad school sans undergrad degree based on connections and it wasn’t 80 years ago.
googlryas 4y ago
Except there may be many cases of to the rules being bypassed after special pleading from the non-connected, but we just never hear about them because the people don't go on to become billionaires years later and write autobiographies.
hammock 4y ago
The wealthy made the rules. Why are you surprised that they should bend or change them at will? It’s not like we had some nationwide democratic vote on the process and requisites for law school admissions
refurb 4y ago
You don’t have to be wealthy to have connections.

paulpauper 4y ago

The rules don't apply to the wealthy. It's their world, you're just living in it. By that logic SBF should be chilling still in the Bahamas , having paid off the authorities

britneybitch 4y ago
SBF only had paper wealth. His political donations totaled tens of millions (iirc). On this scale that's a rounding error. To paraphrase Chris Rock, SBF was rich, but Charlie Munger is wealthy.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  He was a highly privileged kid, son of Stanford professors / attorneys, worked for Jane Street, raised a couple billion in capital and would have stayed a billionaire if he just hadn't stolen from his customers. FTX by itself was worth billions without the degenerate Alameda trading strategies being deployed against their own clients.
  - largepeepee 4y ago
    Problem is Alameda was needed by FTX as a market maker. Alameda was over 50% of the trades and often the counterparty of the others. It is a scam in the end, FTX will die without Alameda.
- ideamotor 4y ago
  This debate makes zero sense. You are both arguing where some extremely binary line is placed in society. If this how you all think about everything?
- hinkley 4y ago
  A really cynical view of the world is that the rags to riches story is something the power structure tolerates because it 1) brings in a little fresh blood to replace families that self destruct and to give them something else to gossip about and 2) the token successes are an opiate for the masses. The moment they lose all hope head will roll. Most days I try not to think this way but some days it’s difficult to avoid. Someone else said the problem was that SBF stole from his customers. And while it’s true that this is often sufficient to bring you down, it’s often only when you steal from the powerful that the wheels of justice turn so swiftly. He’s being made an example.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > only when you steal from the powerful that the wheels of justice turn so swiftly SBF stole nothing meaningful from anyone powerful.
    - leereeves 4y ago
      He did something worse: he embarrassed them.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > he embarrassed them Who is “them”? There is no serious power embarrassed by FTX. The seriously powerful never got close enough to be tarnished.
        richbell 4y ago
        I think the closest you'd get is Larry David, Kevin O'Leary, and Tom Brady. Wealthy but definitely not anyone of serious power or consequence.
        leereeves 4y ago
        That may be true, but perception matters, and a lot of virtual ink has been spent on his political ties, donations, contributions to regulation, and meetings with government officials, all the way up to the White House. Powerful people are acting quickly to publicly distance themselves from him.
Mikeb85 4y ago
He robbed other rich people, cancels it out.
lefrenchy 4y ago
He made other rich people lose money, that’s a no no.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
largepeepee 4y ago
Well SBF pissed off too many wealthier people and was too obvious in his infinite money scam. Munger at least has proved himself many times and has the history to show it. Poor comparison.

pembrook 4y ago

Yes, like 80 years ago. Nobody would accuse Ivy League schools of being bastions of fairness. We all know nepotism & pay-for-play is a core part of their business model. But I'm not sure you could get away with that today. You'd have to make a sizable 'donation' instead.

jackmott 4y ago
And now we still live under the thumb of billionaires made by those acts 80 years ago, and he insults the youth for complaining about it to.
csa 4y ago
> But I'm not sure you could get away with that today. As long as an applicant meets the minimum/lower-end standards for admissions, Ivy League professors in grad schools (law, mba, and PhD-track… not sure about medicine)can and do make by-name requests for admissions that are best not ignored.
darth_avocado 4y ago
You pretty much get away with it even today.
yieldcrv 4y ago
and they shouldn't be expected to be fair Ivy League schools survived for 300 years before a couple decades of the general public thinking that they need Ivy League, due to the corporate sector’s inability to screen a larger working population Ivy League schools will survive this meme too. Academia as a whole has never adjusted to the underclass’ need to learn for the purpose of making money, they teach irrelevant theory for the sole pursuit of knowledge to this very day They are for the wealthy to connect with each other and build rapport with each other The rest of us are just … around

raincom 4y ago

Today, the wealthy play a different game than what Charlie's dad did. If you belong to the right group (wealth, political connections, power, etc), if you can give $5M donation, you can get into Harvard.

melling 4y ago

Buffett applied to Harvard and was rejected. He did ok. https://inshorts.com/m/en/amp_news/warren-buffett-was-rejected-by-harvard-business-school-1472553825956 https://inshorts.com/m/en/amp_news/warren-buffett-was-reject...

majani 4y ago

The Ivies only recently became places for the smartest students to go. In the beginning they were openly just rich kid schools, like Le Rosey and Eton today.

scottyah 4y ago
Taking capable youth, imprinting them with love for you while enabling them to become rich is a lot better business model than taking in kids whose parents have generational money and asking for some of it.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  No it isnt. It’s what you want and little else
TrackerFF 4y ago
Rich WASPs - they did discriminate against minorities (Jews in particular) for the longest time, and still continue to do so. Elite schools feeding the powerful and elite companies / institutions with good ol' boys has always been quite symbiotic.

ajra 4y ago

He didn’t have an undergraduate degree because he dropped out of college to serve in the military during WW2, and then graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law. Yes, his family connections certainly helped, but it’s hard to say he wasn’t deserving of a place.

tenpies 4y ago
Also worth noting that practicing law in the US, even today, does not require an undergraduate. That requirement is purely a result of academia being academia and eagerly wasting 4 years of people's lives for the sake of not finding a better way to filter people. In most states, to pass the bar, you only need a Juris Doctor which is usually received upon graduating from law school. In some states you don't even need this, and in some others you can skip law school entirely by studying under a judge or practicing attorney[1]. Law, especially in the US, is much more like a trade that accidentally ended up being taught by the universities, instead of a trade school separate from academia. Very similar to medicine in that regard, where again, there is no need for an undergraduate degree to practice medicine. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_bar_in_the_United_States#Educational_requirement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_bar_in_the_Un...
- vajrabum 4y ago
  No need for an undergraduate degree to practice medicine? Well perhaps not but if you look at the list of classes required to enter most medical schools, and the content of the curriculum most anybody is going to be hard pressed to get in, much less get through it without something pretty close to an undergraduate major in biology or chemistry.
crossroadsguy 4y ago
Then how would you say he was not deserving of the place? OP apparently isn’t talking about the subject’s brilliance or so. I think the OP is talking specifically about the rule bending for the rich. > … his family connections certainly helped, but … Put few people with similar background — except the socioeconomic part of their backgrounds in the same situation and see whether they would have made it. I doubt it. So, I’d say you can omit the “but”.

SnowHill9902 4y ago

Nobody said that Harvard is fair.

pinewurst 4y ago

Not so much wealthy as being connected. I used to work with someone admitted to Stanford grad school sans undergrad degree based on connections and it wasn’t 80 years ago.

googlryas 4y ago

Except there may be many cases of to the rules being bypassed after special pleading from the non-connected, but we just never hear about them because the people don't go on to become billionaires years later and write autobiographies.

hammock 4y ago

The wealthy made the rules. Why are you surprised that they should bend or change them at will? It’s not like we had some nationwide democratic vote on the process and requisites for law school admissions

refurb 4y ago

You don’t have to be wealthy to have connections.