Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again?
Being some kind of passionless drone that can't imagine anything greater in life than some kind of decadent "access to all the finest things in the world" is really not aligned with the hacker mindset. I think I speak for many here when I say that if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd just be hacking things on a much larger scale.
No one can possibly say this with full absolute certainty, the same way no one truly knows how they'll act in the face of (or aftermath of) parenthood, poverty, war, death, illness, etc.
One doesn't end up at Brin levels of wealth without some part of their psyche changing.
Elon Musk fits that to a T: he was the richest dude on the planet by far, with not just one but three wildly successful companies under his belt as either founder or at least very significant investor (I'm not interested in the usual "Musk didn't found Tesla" debate), more women, wives, affairs and kids than most people will ever have had, being wildly beloved by progressives for kicking the legacy car industry so hard in their butts that they haven't recovered to this date, and being beloved by the "fiscal conservative" crowd as well for pulverizing the Boeing/ULA monopoly on spaceflight.
Normal wealthy people would be perfectly content at that point - they'd live out their days on some yacht with a better wine chamber than many 5-star restaurants, do a bit of gambling here, a bit of charity fundraising there, that kind of stuff. But not Elon Musk, he goes and blows dozens of billions of dollars of his own and Saudi oil sheikh money to buy Twitter, a failing social media platform. Just WTF?
Page and Brin wanted to organize the world’s info. I think they accomplished that and I suspect the googleplex can answer all their questions.
Of course he has turned to politics, just not in the conventional way - he's not a native US citizen, so he can't do a Trump and run for President. Instead he's messing around with Twitter by allowing the far-right to run completely rampant on it.
It appears to me that he has absolutely turned to politics, if you look at his tweets, they are almost entirely political these days.
He wanted to buy Twitter purely for political reasons, and said as much.
I’d also argue he technically is investing, given all of the companies he’s starting, even OpenAI started from his investment. There’s Neuralink, Boring Company, and probably others. Though in Musk’s case it might be his autism/adhd.