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No one should have the wealth he does. We sneer that people look up to him for spending a small part of his wealth to benefit others when he should not have enough money to fund $500 million science projects.
A billion and a million (the actual number for inauguration donations) are very different numbers, and if you mix the two up accidentally, it mean your world model is horrifically broken. One is plausible, one is absurd in this context.
> one of the oldest and largest sectors of the economy just needed an untrained rich guy to fly in and save the day
This is just investing. There are many old moribund sectors of the economy that could use investors not focused on quarterly profits. This is not a controversial statement in any other context, you just don't like it because it's Ellison doing it.
It’s a shame that rather than just hire experts and give them access to the unlimited funding to advance the field he attempted to reinvent the wheel with ‘disrupters’ but it is what it is
This is the problem I have with startups/tech that intend to revolutionize farming: it's rarely to improve life for people, but rather to increase profits. Perhaps Ellison does, indeed, intend to use this farming tech to help bring food to hungry people around the world - and that would be great! But I'm skeptical; Larry's never struck me as an altruistic dude.
I don't get where this moralistic perspective that everything has to be done selflessly for some greater good has come from.
Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.
There's no punishment occurring at all. There's just people saying stuff, waiting to see how billionaire overlords decide to proceed, perhaps hoping they get lucky and ruthless enough to join that class.
When wealthy people start tinkering with stuff like our food supply, in the past that has had big consequences for humans (think things like the Dust Bowl or Various British-led famines, or the Holomodor and/or great leap forward if that's your bend).
A lot of us are aware that it's not great to have one human with an outsized influence working on large systems about which they have little expert knowledge or personal experience:
those folks can do things that have great consequences for our lives while experiencing no repercussions themselves.
For instance, I'm pretty sure some asshole is going to try to fix global warming by unilaterally deciding to change the albedo of the planet, and that'll cause massive problems. They will smugly claim that at least someone is "trying" something (instead of adjusting the ecocide of the planet by the forces that created their wealth) and when it goes wrong they will just retire to their lair in Montana or wherever and tell themselves that at least they didn't buy another great big toy.