It’s pretty neat to see this new generation of billionaires doing something good with their money. For a long time, including the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, extraordinarily rich people like Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, and Warren Buffett did nothing positive with the wealth they generated; the sat on it. Now it’s cool to see people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos take huge risks with their money to try to create world-changing technologies, including Musk’s Solar City, Tesla, and SpaceX; and both of them trying to make “getting into space” a more practical, less-expensive, reusable technology.
(To his credit, Bill Gates made a small entry into philanthropy in 1994, then in 2000 created the “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,” which in 2013 was the world’s wealthiest charitable foundation.)