It certainly makes you wonder, what other innovations could we have made decades ago, but nobody was willing to take the risk? Currently most of our innovation

It certainly makes you wonder, what other innovations could we have made decades ago, but nobody was willing to take the risk? Currently most of our innovation is directed towards computer systems for keeping track of people and data, which in many cases can be broadly characterized as systems of control. And that appears to be what our society prioritizes, whereas a company like SpaceX only comes along once in a blue moon. And Elon himself is sort of a fluke as he's a person who is both a child of wealth, and also has a curious mind and a knack for understanding engineering problems. There are lots of curious people with a knack for understanding engineering problems but most of them weren't born into money and of the ones that were, only Elon has emerged as willing to make SpaceX level risky investments. It makes sense; if you're that rich, you have no desire to genuinely innovate, since you're already set for life and by definition are one of the people who benefited from society being exactly as it is. Maybe that's the real takeaway here: the people at the top of society by definition benefited from things being as they are, therefore those people are the least likely to want innovations that might cause real change. Therefore to the extend that society is unequal, it is also unable to innovate. I wonder if you could put that hypothesis to the test with data.