And you're right. It's a great idea. A sort of white-hat political force (controlling a tangled web of various corporation/non-profit/PAC type entities) that, instead of trying to gain some narrow advantage at the expense of the public, does the opposite.
If Bezos really has the balls to spend it, he has enough money; a presidential campaign, the most expensive kind, only costs 1.2 gigadollars or so[1].
You only need 60 senators and a couple hundred members of the House of Representatives to get whatever shit done you want. So doling out $10,000,000,000.00 a year or so in the right places would go a long way.
Of course, eight years later you're broke, the patient hegemony of other rich people and corporate interests reasserts itself, and America starts sliding down the path to democratic failure again...
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
Rupert Murdoch is the primary backer of all things right wing in the world, and does more to influence elections and governments than Russia ever could. He wields that influence through media ownership.
[Roche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoffmann-La_Roche) [Merck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merck_Group) [Bayer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer) [Sanofi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanofi)
Even supposing all pharmaceutical innovation comes from the U.S. still does not show that without the U.S. there would be none. Clearly there is a market for drugs and the U.S. is not the only country with research capabilities.
Taxes are not that much higher elsewhere. People are not being taxed to death elsewhere.
It seems the barbarians are certainly at the gates. Oh well, we had a good ride.
For less than the cost of SpaceX they could have just bribed congress to give NASA sufficient funding.
For less than the cost of whatever Bill Gates tries to do with education, he could have just bribed congress to fund schools properly.
If they really believed in equal rights regardless of gender, sex, nationality, sexual orientation, race or religion, they could bribe congress to fix those things.
If they cared about the environment, you could bribe congress to fund the EPA more.
Single payer health care, they can just make it happen.
If I had that money, that's sure as hell what I would be doing with it. The fact that they haven't already suggest to me that maybe they don't actually believe in these things as much as they sometimes pretend to. Rich assholes never put their money where their mouth is.
And when I say bribe I mean the legal kind. Where you fund their campaigns through SuperPACs. You can outspend those Koch bros. easily. Why not go for it?