Do you have friends you really love, but really disagree with? I do. Recently, over dinner, a close friend of many years argued that we have to tolerate extreme wealth and people like Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Cook, and Bezos because they are the true innovators and benefactors. In his view, they need control of vast resources to give the public the “stuff” it wants—space exploration, iPhones, AI. As long as basic needs are met, he said, we shouldn’t use regulation, taxes, or antitrust enforcement to limit great fortunes because that would choke off the innovation we crave.

I couldn’t just nod along. Here’s what I told him. (We are still friends.)

We’re often sold a simple story: a lone billionaire has a big idea, changes the world, and gets rich. But if you look closely at things like the iPhone, space travel, or mRNA vaccines, the real story is different: the public takes most of the risk, and private companies take most of the rewards.

Think about the iPhone. The key pieces that make it “smart” — the internet, GPS, tiny powerful chips, touchscreens, voice assistants — were built over many years with public money, in government labs and universities. Then a company like Apple came along, put those pieces together in a beautiful way, sold the final product, and kept tight control over the whole system. Regular people paid to create the ingredients; investors made money from the recipe.

Space works the same way. For decades, NASA and other public agencies developed rockets, navigation, and our basic knowledge of space. Today’s private space companies use that know‑how, plus billions in government contracts and access to public launch sites. Their leaders claim credit and love to bask in adulation, sure. But their big “innovations” sit on top of a platform taxpayers already built.

Medicine tells a similar story. mRNA vaccines came out of decades of grant‑funded research by scientists who mostly cared about understanding biology and saving lives. Once that science was ready to use, drug companies stepped in to patent their versions, run the factories, and make very large profits.

Did you know that insulin was discovered and first purified by a few nerdy researchers in a university lab with modest institutional support, not as a project of industrial barons? They sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a Canadian dollar so it could be widely produced, explicitly rejecting monopoly profits.

Or what about Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. Dr. Salk’s life saving innovation was developed with philanthropy and mass small‑donor funding (March of Dimes) and public institutional support; when asked who owned the patent, Salk famously said, “Well, the people…Could you patent the sun?”

No billionaires needed.

So is progress driven by billionaires, or by passionate scientists and public investment? Clearly, the latter. Curious researchers and public institutions take the early, risky steps. The Wealthy show up later when it’s time to scale and monetize proven science for profit.

We pretend the rich do it alone. It’s a lie they love to tell themselves and, now that they are buying up the media, tell everyone. But it isn’t true: the rich don’t innovate. They buy up innovation, produced by curious researchers and the public that funds them, and then sell what all of us helped create back to us for a big. fat. fee.