I keep asking which problems a billionaire should obsess over. Two answered with their own money. Yvon Chouinard gave Patagonia to a trust and a nonprofit so its profits fight climate change. Bill Gates funds the fight against outbreaks and, through TerraPower, safer nuclear power, which also fights climate change. Both picked foundational problems, whose solutions solve other problems.
The first test is whether the problem is real. Sabine Hossenfelder argues some famous problems in physics are not problems, only discomfort with how the numbers look. A real problem is a clash between theory and observation.
The Department of Government Efficiency defined the problem as bloat. Analysts at Brookings and the Manhattan Institute said at the start that the money was not there: most spending is benefits, defense, and interest. The promised two trillion dollars shrank to a disputed fraction. Then Elon Musk called the 2025 spending law “a disgusting abomination” for raising the deficit. His own objection conceded that deficits are written by law, not by bloat. The toxicity of X, formerly Twitter, is by contrast a real problem, the kind Haidt warns about.
The second test is who should own it. Frame a problem as one person’s, and the fix lives and dies with them. That is three risks in one: control, ego, and continuity. Frame it as a public problem and we all own it, under rules that outlast any donor. The money sits on both sides of politics. So the question is not whether the rich are good, but whether one basket should hold all the eggs.
Open source shows the answer’s shape. Much of the internet runs on code kept by unpaid volunteers. That is how a burned-out maintainer handed the keys to a stranger, who slipped a backdoor into a library on most Linux systems.
The fixes that work are collective. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency pays maintainers with public money. Alpha-Omega pools money from big technology firms for security work. Neither depends on one patron.
I once thought the tension was fast against slow, individual against group. It is not. A billionaire can think slowly, and a committee can panic. The real tension is ownership, ego, and continuity, and rules fix those, not a better billionaire.
So yes, obsess, and give. Forbes grades the giving. Someone should grade what it fixed. Then hand the problem back to the rest of us.