He doesn't mean it's particular to Bezos, but that wealthy people throwing massive (to anyone but them) amounts of money into extremely speculative bets on large issues for the long run of society is a big deal.
The government and major corporations are slow and inertial, invested in iterative improvements on existing paradigms, as low risk small improvements are baked into the foundation of the incentive structure for their entire org. If you're CEO of a major company and make the company a tiny bit more efficient your life is great, but if you bet a billion dollars on pivoting the company towards a potential major improvement and the numbers come up wrong, your business is potentially structurally compromised and your life is relatively screwed. It's just not really worth it to gamble with your main game.
These extremely speculative, niche, very capital intensive, long time horizon bets on paradigm changes couldn't exist without large amounts of funding from contrarian and extremely risk tolerant backers.
Very wealthy people being willing to play with millions to billions of dollars in a way that is very likely to crash and burn enables risky exploration of paradigm changes like "can I get a rocket to land upright and use it again?", or "can I take a major publication and profitably revert its online funding model to subscriptions to retain integrity of its journalism in the era of the attention economy?"
That kind of exploration is important and interesting.
Jeff Bezos isn't necessarily more important than other people that also invest in impactful things, but he is the wealthiest person in the world and invests in speculative things that impact how the world works, which is kind of a big deal.
Also, the parent comment did say that the projects are important, not Jeff Bezos. I was just talking about the interaction of wealthy investors and their side projects, which is what this thread is about.
The government and major corporations are slow and inertial, invested in iterative improvements on existing paradigms, as low risk small improvements are baked into the foundation of the incentive structure for their entire org. If you're CEO of a major company and make the company a tiny bit more efficient your life is great, but if you bet a billion dollars on pivoting the company towards a potential major improvement and the numbers come up wrong, your business is potentially structurally compromised and your life is relatively screwed. It's just not really worth it to gamble with your main game.
These extremely speculative, niche, very capital intensive, long time horizon bets on paradigm changes couldn't exist without large amounts of funding from contrarian and extremely risk tolerant backers.
Very wealthy people being willing to play with millions to billions of dollars in a way that is very likely to crash and burn enables risky exploration of paradigm changes like "can I get a rocket to land upright and use it again?", or "can I take a major publication and profitably revert its online funding model to subscriptions to retain integrity of its journalism in the era of the attention economy?"
That kind of exploration is important and interesting.