Here’s the thing: Most of these people aren’t plagiarizing in the traditional way we think of it. They’re paying poor college students from less prestigious colleges to write the research papers for them, and then slap their name on it. It’s actually not surprising the poor student might drop some plagiarized stuff in there, because they’re not really getting paid what they are worth. Deep down they know they are helping build a world where they will never get ahead because they’re literally being paid to do the research that will give someone else far better credentials than they will ever have.
This has been going on for fucking decades. You just find some poor smart schmuck who doesn’t have the financial ability to get their education in order, and offer them the finances they need in exchange for essentially giving a rich kid a fake prestigious degree, based on the fact a lot of the rich kids “original research” was done by someone else entirely.
All these rich twats have been faking their credentials for decades, that’s why the mask has so visibly come off in the last few years: they don’t even realize the “rules” of the game they are playing, and now we’re officially back to a world where the aristocracy thinks they’re better than the rest of us by simply just existing. They have zero functional reason to believe this, especially when they pay others to do their work and jobs for them, because they’re far too painfully incompetent. The thing is, they don’t think they are incompetent, and they won’t take no for an answer, so they’ve slowly gotten rid of all the competent people at the top, as well, because they can’t have people questioning their vision. (Elon Musk has done a great job of showing how thin their skin is and how ready he is to eject anyone from his workplaces who question him.)
If you think any “elite” person whether at Harvard or post-Harvard in the business world hasn’t partaken in this, you’re kidding yourself. Yale and Harvard fucking exist to crank out these “elite” people who go on to become billionaires. Bill Ackman is a Harvard graduate himself and his wife was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.