I often think that if I were a billionaire,I'd rather spend hundreds of millions on some cool R&D projects rather than having some 100 meter boat that one uses a only a few times a year. I could at least walk around in 20 or so years and say "I funded this" rather than pointing at a rusting boat nobody will ever care about.
In fact this tradition of rich people founding universities and research is nothing new. Stanford University was founded by a couple who said "The children of California shall be our children" after their child died. Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Technical Schools, and John Harvard donated money and his library to a college founded two years earlier.
Allen donated about $2 billion to charitable causes [1] when he was alive. This included several whimsical stuff that wasn't research like Experience Music Project and Museum of Science Fiction. Relatively I believe he spent far more on luxuries he liked including world's most expensive yatch(es), fleet of private jets, mensions around the world, private music concerts, few sports teams here and there.
> This included several whimsical stuff that wasn't research like Experience Music Project and Museum of Science Fiction.
While not research, those things can have profound impacts on people. Several years ago a Star Wars exhibit came to the Indiana State Museum here in Indianapolis, they had an entire section dedicated to both the prosthetic devices in the film and in real life, one of the video segments playing next to some props from the film and real prosthetic devices was a clip of one of the inventors of the real technology talking about how watching the film version directly led to him pursuing his career and working directly on various prosthetic devices trying to make it a reality.
These sorts of experiences could have profound impact on the creative process for one or more individuals that might have far more profound effects for society than active research.
That’s a strange sentiment for thread on OpenAI, considering it is one of many startups founded a guy who decided to take the millions from his sale of PayPal and do cool R&D projects like spaceships, electric cars, solar power, AI, and brain-machine interfaces. Good thing Elon Musk didn’t buy a boat I guess.
> I often think that if I were a billionaire,I'd rather spend hundreds of millions on some cool R&D projects rather than having some 100 meter boat that one uses a only a few times a year.
Billionaires buy cars and boats because they're stores of value. For instance, a Mclaren from the 90s is worth more today than when it was sold.
This article is more than five years old, so I'll let it speak for itself:
This shows that in the 12 months to the end of June the value of classic cars as a whole was up by 28%, which compared with a rise of 12% for the FTSE-100 index of leading shares and a 23% slump in the price of gold.
