I don't think it's necessarily people with great wealth. It's the people who have made great wealth that appear to be doing things like this. IIRC James Cameron

I don't think it's necessarily people with great wealth. It's the people who have made great wealth that appear to be doing things like this. IIRC James Cameron drove tractor-trailers for a living before he broke into being a director. As we all know, Google started in a garage. Steve Jobs backpacked around India, etc. What we seem to be seeing is that these "new money" entrepreneurs spend a great portion of their wealth, using their skills at innovation and bulldogging people into doing what they need, to make great changes. It's worthy of note that Rockefeller, who was the worlds first billionaire, donated $550 million through his philanthropy by 1918. He essentially made the University of Chicago. From about 1900 to 1940 his personal wealth was steady at approximately 1% of the US GDP. More notable still, is that from his first pay check he gave 10% of his earnings to his church. His funding of medical research was instrumental in the eradication of hookworm and yellow fever. Bill Gates is rather fittingly working in Rockefeller's shoes. I think its fantastic that these "new money" billionaires are literally chasing their dreams and dragging us along with them. I'm 24, and at 16 I was thinking that my chance of seeing another planet or even space was solely reliant on finding some LSD. Essentially I put the factual chance of my seeing space to be 1 in a trillion. With SpaceX and announcements like this, I feel like they must have when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I feel like I should be sleeping in the back seat of my car while it flies me to work and that I'll go vacation on Mars and go for a weekend getaway in LEO. It's amazing to me that in such a short time that this shit has become possible again.