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Originally Posted by JinnKai
I'll accept that it's a lack of imagination if you can list something more .."imaginative." Money is material. It buys material things, period.
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Well, I edited my post above to add a couple of examples, before I saw your answer. So check up there for some blatherings about Ted Turner and Paul Allen. And it's not like they don't get anything -- there's money to be made, and in the meantime Turner gets to be lord of a vast domain, and Allen gets to run a sports team (which continuously generates money) and stand with the rocket guys on the platform on national TV, and apparently is getting a return on his investment to boot.
In my own neck of the woods, a rich former dot-commer built himself a rather large all-solar house (30,000 watts of solar on the roof) and shows it off as a solar demonstrator to anyone who wants to see. He also fought the power company on limitation on how much power home solar systems could feed back to the grid, and won some concessions. He's a flying buff and his wife is into nature photography. So, just for something to do, they took a chopper up and down the California coast twice in the last few years and photographed ever single bit of coastline and donated the info to universities and state agencies, who were very glad to get it. The photos show how erosion, development and other things are changing the coastline, and the only way of getting the "big picture," literally, is through projects like this, which nobody funds.
Two other dot-commers, Bezos of Amazon and another guy whose name I can't recall -- guy who founded Paypal -- are funding private rocket development programs -- because they like rockets. The Paypal guy's company, SpaceX, is close to launching a low-cost booster in the Marshalls.
And hell, go all the way back to Andrew Carnegie, who accumulated a fortune that today would be in the tens of billions, and used it to build libraries all over the world to encourage reading. And even Bill Gates has loosed his wallet, after building that house of his, to spend much, much more trying to fight disease and health problems in poor counties. I think getting married was good for him.
You find a lot of projects like these among rich dot-commers, successful tech entrepreuners, and other people who build their fortunes by, well, dreaming and creating new things. Once they've made their money, they don't stop dreaming and creating and doing; instead, they spend their own money to keep doing so, in ways which please them.