Look, I'm all in favor of opening up opportunities to more people, but let's get real: TED excludes people because the concept doesn't scale, not because it's run by elitists.<p>An open admissions policy would turn TED into something the size of Burning Man. Everyone would pile into the Rose Bowl, you'd get to "meet" the celebrities through binoculars, it would rapidly become even more of a scripted mass-market public event than it is now, and it would scare away many of the real celebrities, who would promptly go and invent TED II as a completely private, members-only meeting which we would never hear much about. You know, like Davos.<p>Instead of complaining about how TED isn't completely open, one should be giving thanks that it isn't completely closed.<p>I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's stories about how impossible it was to give a physics seminar after he won the Nobel Prize. If he scheduled a seminar under his own name, half the city would show up, it would get moved to a huge auditorium, and he would have to abandon his plan to discuss the tricky details of quantum electrodynamics with his peers and give a popular talk instead, because he couldn't bear to bore 95% of his audience to death. Feynman experimented with giving talks under a pseudonym, but found that this just made people angry when they found out, later -- there had been a <i>Nobelist</i> in town, and they didn't know, and they hadn't been invited!