Billionaires provide value as alternate sources of power to the state. Distributed sources of philanthropy that can target areas neglected by government are one thing (Carnegie’s libraries, Bill Gates work on tropical diseases, Frick’s art collection which he donated to the American people, alternate media and educational projects (Ford foundation’s continued funding of NPR, Soros’ Open Society Foundation, Koch funding of the Reason foundation and CATO etc, putting hyperbolic conspiracy theories aside these all enrich the political conversation and increase the opportunities for policy experimentation)). Secondly, billionaires have a good claim on being experienced and skilled deployers of capital. A wealth tax would have limited the capacity for private investment in EV, space flight, the acceleration of cloud computing.

There are two common ripostes to this. One is that these are wasteful vanity projects, which just proves the point that there is value to this sort of decentralized system of capital allocation where some small percentage of total available capital is in the hands of quixotic individuals who can pursue aims that a majority of the population doesn’t (yet) see the value of. The second objection is that these things should all be handled by the state. It’s fine for people to want space exploration to be entirely handled by NASA for instance, but the record is pretty clear that US (and by extension humanity’s) pace of space exploration has been absolutely transformed by the ability for private actors with substantial resources to make moves outside of an existing bureaucracy.

The US government spends upwards of $4T dollars a year, and the media class has a much larger influence on politics than and group of billionaires could buy. Because most billionaires are entrepreneurs they also typically look at ways they can deploy capital that are underserved and where the state would be an inappropriate actor in terms of required risk and innovation. A group of talented weirdos that have the resources to move the needle on neglected projects is a feature not a bug.