What’s with today’s eccentric billionaires? According to betabeat it’s a question as old
as semiconductors: Once you’ve racked up a couple of billion dollars investing
in the tech sector, what are you to do with all that cash? Russian entrepreneur
Yuri Milner–who’s made himself quite a nice little nest egg betting on
companies like Facebook and Groupon–has a somewhat novel answer. The New York
Times reports that he’s founded his very own Nobel Prize.
The Fundamental Physics Prize will dole out $3 million each
to worthy, boundary-pushing thinkers. No experimental proof required, says Mr.
Milner: Sometimes a radical new idea
“really deserves recognition right away because it expands our understanding of
at least what is possible,” Mr. Milner said.
The Times says that the new prize is the academic world’s
most lucrative. The Nobel Prize is $1.2 million and usually split; MacArthur
Genius Grants are a mere $500,000, doled out in quarterly increments. One of the winners, MIT professor Alan Guth,
told the Times, “It knocked me off my feet.” Coming into a small fortune after
a lifetime in academia will do that to you, even if you’re the kind of person
who spends his days contemplating “cosmic inflation,” or the rapid post
big-bang expansion in the universe….
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