Because the whole origin myth of every tech founder for the past 30 years has been "he dropped out of college because traditional institutions couldn't contain his brilliance and then he CHANGED THE WORLD with his futuristic tech brain 😌😌😌" When their mediocrity is exposed, and the need for actual domain knowledge is emphasized, the entire Silicon Valley mythos collapses.

When you point out that this 20-year-old DOGE intern failed, it's like telling them that Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and Peter Thiel and the founders of Snapchat and the founders of Twitter and a million other startups are also worthless and bad. Silicon Valley pours MILLIONS into tech startups because they think some 20-year-old is a genius and can be a founder or co-founder. It's a FUNDING MODEL. People over 40 just don't get funded as often; the age bias towards the "postadolescent prodigy" myth is powerful in tech circles. So this guy being exposed as what he is -- a 20-year-old who doesn't know anything yet, who can't be said to master complicated systems at a glance -- threatens the entire foundational self-image of tech.