Raw LLM Responses

Always have been. Meritocracy is a myth. Literally. The word "meritocracy" was originally coined by a guy to mock the idea and then all the people who wanted to believe that being rich made them smart decided to use it unironically. Being rich does not make them smart, but it does mean they have power. So they were able to propagandize most people into believing them. https://kottke.org/17/03/the-satirical-origins-of-the-meritocracy Google is a perfect example. The founders tried to sell it for $750K and failed. If they had sold it, they would be just a couple of moderately well-off silicon valley techies. Instead they literally failed into becoming mega-billionaires and now they are oligarchs. https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/ > *This story has been circulated for a while, but not many people know about it. Khosla stated it simply: Google was willing to sell for under a million dollars, but Excite didn’t want to buy them.* > *Khosla, who was also a partner at Kleiner Perkins (which ended up backing Google) at the time, said he had “a lot of interesting discussions” with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at the time (early 1999). The story goes that after Excite CEO George Bell rejected Page and Brin’s $1 million price for Google, Khosla talked the duo down to $750,000. But Bell still rejected that.*