When does personal curiosity become an appropriate justification for controlling an enormous allocation of society’s resources?
The question assumes something that billionaires sometimes resist, which is that their fortunes are, in some sense, society’s resources. The resistance is understandable: you earned the money, or at any rate acquired it legally, and it is yours to spend. But the scale of the spending changes its character. A person who spends a thousand dollars on a hobby is making a private choice. A person who spends a billion dollars on a rocket, a reactor or an airship is directing the work of thousands of engineers, the use of scarce materials, the attention of regulators and the trajectory of entire fields of research. He is, in effect, setting a research agenda, and in most societies research agendas of that scale are set by public bodies, with at least a nominal accountability to citizens.
There are good answers to this objection. Public bodies are slow, conservative and captured by incumbents; private patrons can take risks they will not. The history of science contains many discoveries made by eccentrics with money, and some that would not otherwise have been made. Diversity of funders is itself valuable, because it means that the judgement of no single committee determines what gets studied. And the alternative, in which the billionaires spend their money on yachts instead, is not obviously better.
But there are also good reasons for unease. The priorities of the very rich are not the priorities of everyone else. A world in which the direction of research is increasingly set by a few dozen individuals, according to their enthusiasms, is a world in which the problems that interest those individuals (space, longevity, artificial intelligence) attract vast resources, and the problems that interest them less (tropical diseases, crop yields, the plumbing of cities) attract less, except where a particular billionaire happens to have taken them up, as Gates did with malaria and vaccines. The rich have always been able to indulge their curiosity. What is new is that their curiosity now has the purchasing power of a mid-sized state, and that the states themselves have, in some fields, retreated to make room for it.
from The Utterly Reliable But Nonetheless Hugely Entertaining Guide to Being a Tech Billionaire (2026)
