I would expect that increasing the working lifetime of one of the people in question by ~4 years is worth way more than $100k
It is certainly a possibility worth testing using a properly designed metric.
(And that’s ignoring the indirect effects: if one of the runner-up 24 decides to skip college and launch a startup without taking Thiel’s money as a result of this offer, that’s a win for Thiel, even though it would look the opposite in the metric you’re proposing.)
Or get discouraged by the loss and go into finance to work as a quant, or something similarly useless to society.
It is certainly a possibility worth testing using a properly designed metric.
Or get discouraged by the loss and go into finance to work as a quant, or something similarly useless to society.