Aren't they supposed to be the smartest of all quant firms?
A co-founder of something like Jane Street must be making a great deal more than $400k/year. Its probably small change for him.
You cannot make that much money doing those "interesting jobs". You might by financing and employing the people doing them.
A smart person going into finance will definitely make a lot more money than that same person going into another field. Going into finance from an "interesting" field has made a lot people rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons
I do agree that maximising income is not the optimal path. I sacrificed a lot of income for time with my kids and it was definitely the right decision.
And of course, we keep hearing "greed is good". We are very fortunate that some people could see beyond that in the past because we are resting on their financial "sacrifice". Thankfully there are still people who still think that way today, but it is always infuriating to hear people pretend some are stupid for not choosing the path that would maximize their earnings.
I think it is a sort of projection from "small minded" people who cannot see anything beyond what they would do, precisely because they are intellectually limited and thus cannot properly reason about those "issues".
Well, for FAANG and the second tier.
Meanwhile, I don't know if you've looked around lately but I see security startups that are well funded offering <200K for Senior ICs.
There is a band, but whats termed intelligence.
Being able to identify market arbitrage has little to do with biology and rocket science, and smart people are already working on such problems with the limitations of current fields well known. Throwing "smart” people at solving cancer isn't going to magically solve cancer.
When people were confused why Sam Bankman Fried behaved as stupidly as he did and thought this was all an act, no they genuinely are like overgrown kids who don't know what guile is, they couldn't survive in a rough neighborhood of New York let alone deal with South Sudanese arms dealers.
EDIT: My bad, I didn't realize he was part of the article, didn't take the time to deal with the paywall.
From TFA (emphasis mine)
> The new chronology is a pseudohistorical theory proposed by Anatoly Fomenko who argues that events of antiquity generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later.
> The theory further proposes that world history prior to AD 1600 has been widely falsified to suit the interests of a number of different conspirators, including the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of Romanov, all working to obscure the "true" history of the world centered around a global empire called the "Russian Horde".
But he said and did lots of embarassing things.
I guess that's part of the definition of genius.