A Sign of Disruption. Income Through Education. When companies become universities: the board the education system never saw coming

While headlines obsess over whether the tech bubble will burst or not, the reality is simpler and far more uncomfortable: neither capital nor time is enough anymore to achieve returns within the deadlines Wall Street demands.

The major funds know it, and they’ve started to move. In 2025, for example, the U.S. government bought roughly 15% of several private companies dedicated to rare-earth extraction (MP Materials), those elements hidden in the penultimate row of the periodic table that power batteries, semiconductors, and defense systems. The move, closer to CHINESE AUTHORITARIAN CAPITALISM than to the Western idea of free markets, signals a geopolitical realignment. But behind that maneuver lies something deeper: a direct disruption of the present.

Some years ago, while advising a university, I used Victory —our methodology based on wargames— to map not only current competitors but improbable future ones. The question was simple and brutal: who could take the thirty thousand dollars (or more) that a family allocates to a university education?

The hypothesis was clear: a global holding company, with brand power, technology, and the ability to offer mentorship and real employability, could steal the university’s most stable revenue stream. If a company decides to educate talent with immediate hiring effects, the university becomes a very expensive middleman.

What sounded like futurism is now news. Palantir Technologies launched its Meritocracy Fellowship with a blunt tagline: “Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree.”

Practical training, mentorship, real projects, and job opportunities inside the company’s own ecosystem. No campus, no faculty, no rectors —just applied learning and intellectual property. It isn’t an extension of the education system. It’s a replacement. The first piece of a new normal: companies teaching in order to hire (and avoiding the theft of million-dollar talent, the way Meta has been abducting people from OpenAI).

Something deep is being rearranged: tech companies stopped selling products and started selling knowledge. Education, which has gone more than three centuries without a true interruption, has finally met its antagonist.

The university model still operates as if we were in 1750:

• a single voice emits knowledge,everyone else validates it through ritual, not efficiency.

• It survived industrialization and digitalization. But today it faces an enemy faster than any curricular reform: technological acceleration.

• While a university takes years to update a curriculum, a learner can master new skills with a private mentor in three months. And yes, it may now be cheaper to “pay” Aristotle for a conversation than to maintain the institutional machinery required to certify a diploma.

The real battlefield isn’t academia; it’s talent.

In a market where automation will make half the workforce redundant, companies seek creative, adaptable profiles capable of integrating diverse knowledge. If they can train them internally, with no debt and with a contract, why wait for a degree? Why not replace it with a certificate, with a verifiable blockchain contract? A new corporate citizenship is emerging —one where people learn, belong, and produce within the same ecosystem. Large conglomerates will operate like micro-states: culture, media, software, rules… and possibly their own education systems and even “stablecoins,” powered by the Genius Act signed by Trump in April 2025.

The detour. The ally could become a better bet for high potential students, skipping time and debt.

When I posed this hypothesis during that university consultancy, it sounded exaggerated. Today it’s simply reality taking its first small step. The market may continue debating whether there is a bubble or not, but the deeper transformation is happening far beyond what any local outlet can cover: companies are colonizing the territory of knowledge as a mechanism to improve the efficiency of their human capital.

The future of education has already begun —inside the “campus” of the companies that learn to teach.

The board beneath your feet is shifting. Hesitating to decide is putting your organization at risk. Failing to bring your most valuable talent into the same room to define the course ahead is wasting what you pay them for: their ability to think, not just to operate.