billionaires want you to know they could have done physics
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters link it whenever a rich tech person boasts about physics prowess or gives self-regarding life advice, using it as a shorthand punchline and a serious critique of billionaire mythmaking.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What it is
Physicist and YouTuber Angela Collier examines why billionaires and tech figures like Bill Gates keep claiming they could have been physicists. She covers the "Nobel disease" and Walter Isaacson-style hagiography, and reads Ayn Rand through her own experience of enjoying it. The format is a 50-minute essay-style commentary.
What people said
Recommends Frummy · 2025-01 · Hacker News · on “I am rich and have no idea what to do”
Idk read ”the monk who sold his ferrari” or something not that i have (read book, or ferrari) Also [this video] but for millionaire equivalent instead of billionaire e: advice comes in all shapes and forms. you want me to lie to him? what would buddha do
Recommends ProllyInfamous · 2026-08 · Hacker News · on “Nobel Disease”
If anybody else wants to sip on this: < [this video] > Thanks for some coffeetime thoughts. ---- Something I have in common with Ms. Collier is that we both interpreted Atlas Shrugged as satirical, when in fact Author Rand was dead serious on her "objectivist" theories within her book. ---- My Twin and I approach life almost entirely different, akin to his opposite enjoyment of Shrugged as "aspirational utopia." Even with identical DNA, our brains differ on such fundamental outlook of the elites' motivations (vs *almost everybody elses').
Cites arscynic · 2025-01 · Hacker News · on “I am rich and have no idea what to do”
"I don't fucking care what people say. Go America. Go capitalism. Go free markets. Go hard work." So if everyone works as hard as him, then everyone can become rich and retire early? Instead of studying physics in the "jungle" he should be studying logic, ethics, and history. Pay your goddamn taxes, elect uncorruptable politicians, and support free open source software. "billionaires want you to know they could have done physics." —Angela Collier, physicist; [this video]
Cites SiempreViernes · 2025-01 · Hacker News · on “Supernovae Evidence for Foundational Change to Cosmological Models”
Maybe it's some deep cultural hangup the CS people got at university, there's certainly too much "I could have done physics" in the top personas of tech for it to be pure coincidence. [this video]