His intelligence and openness, despite no one paying him for it, shines such a bad light on the terrible state of academia. That he was considered a "bad student" is near-proof in and of itself that our system judges people catastrophically poorly.
(This is a genuine question. I've never met Alex in person, but if an applicant to my lab spent their free time diving into SIMD implementations and breaking records for computing mathematical constants, I'd rush to hire them. Not that either of those two things is a requirement, of course.)
"However, ever since grade school, I've always sucked in terms of grades and standardized tests. I graduated from Palo Alto High School in the bottom quartile among all the college-bound students. My GPA was barely a 3.0 at graduation, so it was somewhat miraculous that I got accepted into Northwestern University at all."[1]
I know he has a masters and all, but he is spectacular. Hundreds of thousands of people have masters degrees. He is more impressive than 99% of professors, and academia doesn't even acknowledge him as a peer of them.
I'm not in his head, but it sounds like his ideal job would be professor.
Let's presume that second paragraph is true. He doesn't have that job, let alone have it at a top university. He hasn't been given a PhD (a de facto minimum requirement for that job). UIUC is great, but in a tier below other schools, who presumably didn't admit him (or made him pay too much).
But saying he's "ranked in the top 1%" is very disingenuous to this conversation. The 99th percentile basketball doesn't make a college team. And I'm saying he belongs on the NBA All-Star team. And yes, it would be a "catastrophically bad" bad process if Anthony Davis couldn't have made a college team. But the difference between 99th percentile and 99.9999th percentile is enormous, and mistaking one for the other in any context is terrible.