There's some truth to this... but even if true, things could be a lot worse than having the uber wealthy become patrons of smart people. I suppose the danger c

There's some truth to this... but even if true, things could be a lot worse than having the uber wealthy become patrons of smart people. I suppose the danger comes from the smart people realizing that it's a lot easier to gather kudos for putting together good talks than from doing actual quality R&D. Then again, it's been the case for a long time that PIs are really spokesmen for their groups, and are usually quite abstracted away and have less input into day to day research. I say as long as TED helps spread ideas across fields, and inspires rich people enough to fork over $$$, it's all OK.