Ideally, the value that Elon Musk has captured would instead go to an institution that we collectively control, like NASA, and we would accomplish the same thin

Ideally, the value that Elon Musk has captured would instead go to an institution that we collectively control, like NASA, and we would accomplish the same things but in a more accountable way. Is it really right and fair that society is ploughing money into Mars colonization, without any of us having been consulted, just because some nerd got "disruptive" with banking regulations? In any case, Elon Musk is a pretty bad example because most billionaires do not orient their investment activities around some forward-thinking idealistic goal like Elon has. For every Elon, there's a hundred very boring billionaires who are perfectly content with swinging their wealth around in ways that just make society worse, like lobbying politicians and buying up chunks of economically valuable real estate in cities. Money is power, and power begets more power. People shouldn't be able to circumvent democracy no matter how cleverly they've played the economy game.