Why don’t more Big Tech employees become gentlemen scholars?

This question generated a lot of interesting conversation on Twitter. Some of the answers I found more compelling:

• People who would be excited to engage in scholarship/art would probably try to find ways to start doing it more cheaply, earlier… and would quit their Big Tech jobs before they accumulated enough capital to really retire.
• The kind of people who can get this kind of Big Tech job are skewed against the kind of people who will want to (or be good at) engage at curiosity-directed independent scholarship.
  • Corollary: Big Tech will exacerbate this; ten years at Google will change you.
• They can get most of the benefit at much lower cost. i.e. there are tech jobs for senior people which amount to 90% of “independent scholarship”, but still with great pay; or, you can actually just go to grad school and not have to support yourself; etc.
• Many people with the means to do this end up starting a start-up anyway, rather than doing independent scholarship, because that’s a higher-leverage way to explore their ideas.
• It’s hard to be part of a community in this context; illegibility exacerbates this.
• It’s harder to save up this kind of nest egg than I’d imagined. Even at $400k/year, and an intense 60% gross savings rate, you’d need to work for 7-8 years to earn a $2M annuity. And in a less-high-growth market environment, even that might not be enough. Especially once you account for things like health insurance (which I’d ignored).