The author is making a decent point, that out of the 1,000+ billionaires, almost none of them are trying to change the world in a majorly significant way. The vast majority are busy running the businesses that made them billionaires.
Take Mark Cuban. After he sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5 billion, why didn't HE start a space company? Instead he started another TV channel - we already have a bunch of those.
I think Richard Branson is the counter point. There are actually two Tony Starks - Branson and Musk.
I think the problem is legacy. People like that are trying to create the businesses that will define their legacy after they are gone. If you've worked 30-40 years to build a company from scratch and become a billionaire off that (like Walmart or Fedex), that is your legacy. You work til your dying breath trying to make Walmart successful. You don't go try starting robotic or advanced tech businesses.
The vast majority are busy running the businesses that made them billionaires.
Perhaps we just need to look more closely at the list of billionaires "running the businesses that made them billionaires"? Making a spaceship certainly sounds (and is) sexy, but those spaceships are built on top of other technologies like material science, energy storage, communications, etc (and those in turn are built on other technologies like extraction and manufacturing). I'd bet a number of those "businesses that made them billionaires" are working on that kind of tech, but those technologies don't generate the kind of headlines in mainstream media outlets like self-driving cars.
It's the difference between developing packet-switching technologies and Google fiber. You can't have one without the other, but only one sounds exciting.
Take Mark Cuban. After he sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5 billion, why didn't HE start a space company? Instead he started another TV channel - we already have a bunch of those.
I think Richard Branson is the counter point. There are actually two Tony Starks - Branson and Musk.
I think the problem is legacy. People like that are trying to create the businesses that will define their legacy after they are gone. If you've worked 30-40 years to build a company from scratch and become a billionaire off that (like Walmart or Fedex), that is your legacy. You work til your dying breath trying to make Walmart successful. You don't go try starting robotic or advanced tech businesses.