"Science. Science seems broken. The current funding models are broken and favor political skill over scientific genius. We need new business models for basic research. There are a lot of areas where scientific developments can have huge commercial applications — materials, neuroscience, climate engineering, and cheaper/better ways to get to space, just to name a few—and we’d love to figure out a way for it to happen. "

I think he misunderstands the meaning of the term "basic research":

"Basic research (also called pure research or fundamental research) is a systematic study directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena without specific applications or products in mind." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_research)

So the very idea of basic research is that there are no forseeable commercial applications (or indeed any practical applications).

Personally, I think that private funding is NOT suited to finance fundamental research, since the time horizon there is way too long for most VC companies, and I doubt that many of them would finance something "just because it is interesting and we don't understand it yet".