I’m in no way attempting to argue that private capital is bad. I think they all serve a valuable function — we need basic research, we need applied research, and we need private capital to fund the ideas with the highest probability of turning into commercial, and as you send, humanity-benefitting products.

The pharma industry is a really interesting case study in how this plays out. While pharma companies do a ton of their own R&D, they typically only release derivative products. The vast majority of new molecular entities are not coming from pharma company research.

And you are absolutely right about private research doing just fine pre-academic research. I think it becomes harder to maintain as our accumulated knowledge grows. The things we are exploring and innovating on today are just more technologically advanced, but I could be wrong about that. Elon Musk is certainly an individual using private capital to fund his own very innovative r&d.