Earlier this month, I wrote a post about one Lincoln Gong, a high-tech billionaire who was rejected from Harvard as a high school senior. Naturally, Gong succeeded in spite of that and, as the story goes, felt compelled decades later to make a grand statement. He got some of his high-tech billionaire buddies who were also rejected from top schools to pitch in and fund a new private university that wouldn’t feel bad if it were 80-90 percent Asian-American.
It was both an act of vengeance and benevolence.
It was also an April Fools story.
So it’s a good thing Stephen A. Schwarzman is for real.
You might say he’s committing a Gongian act.
Schwarzman is not just a billionaire, singular, but a billionaire, plural, as in billions, thus qualifying him for genuine tycoon status.
Just as the fictional Gong was rejected by Harvard, Schwarzman was a Yale senior in 1969 and rejected for a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to Cambridge University in England.
