US law here is nuanced. Good quick primer https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

First it's absolutely true that orgs that purport to support weird nerds will revert back to rewarding politicians. I've seen it happen, and typically has to do with who is doling out money.

However, in my experience the vast majority of brilliant nerds way overextend themselves, and are much too confident outside their domain. They're also much more likely to be jerks and will tumble from conflict to conflict until they get their way by attrition or status. Conflicts are strangely more personal because so much ego is tied up into it. They're more likely to assume they're right in every (non-tech/science related) situation.

My advice to weird nerds (assuming emotional intelligence isn't an innate skill) is: Find a way to turn your brainpower onto this challenge as equally important as your core interest. Treat interacting with your institution like a long term engineering project or investigation. Think long term and be strategic, create and track longer term plans, try to learn what people respond to, what works and what doesn't. Always try to be kind and maintain some humility, but assuming you aren't sure what that really means, then ask for lots of feedback. Or you can just find someone you trust and delegate all of this to them, like a technical founder hiring a CEO.

(Edit: relatedly, if you work for or with weird nerds in a support role, my advice is to take full advantage! They might have a useful point, so set your own ego aside, don't take it personally (they are weird), and try to listen charitably. Their work is what you're here to support, after all.)

Also once you start framing it as investment or a biz decision in a big public company, the natural question is whether it's the best use of capital for Apple. It's not really about short vs longterm thinking either, it's about the deployment with the highest likelihood to return on any timeframe.