It always starts with world class faculty, who want to be paid well, have all the equipment for their labs and want to be surrounded by other top class research

It always starts with world class faculty, who want to be paid well, have all the equipment for their labs and want to be surrounded by other top class researchers. That will attract the brightest students, you know those that "want to work with professor X because they are doing excellent research on ....", this will attract tier 2 students those whose only goal is to "want to go to university XYZ" and this will have a cascade effect because those brightest students will go and create companies, do great research and will donate money back to their university and that causes exponential growth. If you had 10 billion, i do think you can create a world renowned institution in 10-20 years.