Ted Gioia charts the rise of what we now struggle to avoid … the “public intellectual”:
“Orator at Speakers’ Corner, London, with crowd, 1974” by GeorgeLouis is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 
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I see this term “public intellectual” everywhere nowadays — and it has a nice ring about it. It summons up images of speakers standing on soapboxes proclaiming the truth to passers-by.
That’s actually happened in places like London’s Hyde Park and 125th Street in Harlem. It sounds so very fair and democratic. Not every intellectual teaches at Harvard and Yale. Sometimes they really do exist out in the wild. We ought to nurture and support them.
Not long ago, these same people were often called “working class intellectuals”. I had two uncles who could be described that way — they lacked prestigious degrees and institutional affiliations. They grew up poor, but were smart and well-read and could speak articulately on almost any subject.
A few colleges specialized in educating these working class intellectuals. Consider the case of City College of New York, where the finest minds of the proletariat got book learning on the cheap. (You can find a list of CCNY alums and profs here — it includes an impressive number of Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners.)
But those days are long gone. Working-class intellectuals have vanished in recent years. Instead we have witnessed the rise of millionaire — or billionaire — intellectuals.
There have always been super-rich people, but in the past they kept a low profile. In my youth, the wealthiest person in the world was Howard Hughes, and he stayed in hiding for the last two decades of his life — you couldn’t even find a current photograph of the man.
He was doing us a favor. Hughes was rumored to have abandoned all the niceties of personal hygiene.
During the last fifteen years of his life, Hughes was described as a tall gaunt skeleton of a man with long, unwashed matted hair, a scraggly beard, and fingernails and toenails of such length that curled in upon themselves. He dressed only in a pair of dirty undershorts or went nude.
Believe it or not, Martin Scorsese cast Leonardo DiCaprio to play Hughes in the biopic. You gotta love Hollywood.
Hughes briefly emerged from seclusion on just one occasion. On January 7, 1972, he made a brief phone call from the Bahamas to seven journalists assembled in a room in a Hollywood hotel. This was necessary because a scamming author had published a fake autobiography attributed to Hughes, and the world’s richest man wanted to denounce it as a fraud.
He spoke on the phone for a few minutes, then signed off. That was the last time the media had any contact with Howard Hughes.
After Hughes’s death, the richest person in the world was Daniel Ludwig. You have probably never heard his name. But that’s no surprise — Ludwig was even more reclusive than Hughes. He lived for 95 years, and only gave one interview during that time.
Fast forward to today. Elon Musk is now the wealthiest person in the world — and he’s making proclamations every day. He even bought his own social media platform, and posts his opinions constantly. He’s the reverse of Howard Hughes. You can’t escape him. And unless he flies off to Mars, you never will.
It’s not just Musk. There are dozens of billionaires who aspire to public intellectual status. Bill Gates serves up book reviews. Peter Thiel gives a lecture series. Tom Steyer makes speeches and offers himself as a candidate for President.
We have come a long, long way from the working class intellectuals and soapbox pundits of yore. Everything now is pay-to-play.
How did this happen? When did the status of public intellectual become something you can buy, like merchandise on the shelf at a Rodeo Drive boutique?
