Ultra-wealth gives someone like Elon Musk the power to do great good in the world — and great harm.
The thing about billionaire philanthropy is that it's the worst possible system for getting things done that governments can't be bothered with — except for all the other ones. This is a recurring theme here at Future Perfect. We've written about how abortion and contraception access worldwide is almost exclusively billionaire-funded — indeed, major and crucial advances in safe abortion and contraception were developed through billionaire-funded research, not publicly funded research. We've written about how in the early months of Covid-19, billionaire-funded Fast Grants got money quickly to promising research into treatments and vaccines, even as the expedited NIH approval process for funding still left many talented researchers with no way to get the money they needed for crucial Covid research. In a piece grappling with the billionaire philanthropy dilemma, my colleague Dylan Matthews pointed to other cases from the past, like Julius Rosenwald, the Sears tycoon who funded schools for Black children in the Jim Crow South a century ago. The unifying theme: Sometimes the ultra-rich are able to ensure that critical work for the people who need it most gets done, especially when the government — and the voters who put it in power — are unwilling to do it. So that's the good side. Then there's the bad side. Billionaires are high variance To start a ludicrously successful company in the US these days, and not sell it to Google or whoever and retire quietly with a sizable fortune, you need to be an unusual sort of person. Elon Musk's greatest fans and greatest critics would presumably agree on this much: He is a particularly vivid example of just that. He's clearly great at some of the fundamentals of running a business — most people, after all, could not leverage the investor capital he received into multiple successful businesses in tough industries. He also makes costly, terrible decisions all the time. It's quite possible these tendencies go hand in hand —…