There's a more transparent and straightforward pathway to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge (which actually pays OK and has many social perks) than there is to a tenured professorship in most fields. Judges have Solomon-like-life-and-death power, and the lawyers who argue before them (often successful, high-status people in their own right) are professionally obligated to suck up.
By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.
Yeah, it's mostly either students or academia who admire their hobo kings.
It's kind of like a sport like tennis. If you're in the system, you think that the world number 150 tennis player is amazing, but they barely make enough to afford travel to the matches.
In all fairness though, it's very difficult to become a judge. At least in my country, you have to have been both a defense lawyer and a prosecutor in order to become a judge. It takes many years of experience that is not easily gained.
At the state university in my smaller city, an actual professorship (not some adjunct) earns up towards $200k/year salary. Maybe pretty modest by FAANG standards, but for many people outside of tech that sounds like a lottery jackpot. So it's not just prestige, though that's on offer too.
Professors don't get the summer off. If you have a heavy teaching load, summers are your one window to get research work done. If you don't, like me, the difference between the summer and the rest of the year is its easier to find parking.
Fine, 3-4 months to think about interesting things all day long with basically zero expectation that you’ll be anywhere or show up to anything. Call it what you will.
I mean, its not completely untrue. You do not have set hours. You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs, depending on how despotic you want to be.
By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.