@laelfy I actually quite like Bill Gates, and I should probably declare up front (despite the risk of losing a few allies by doing so 
) that I actually used to work for Microsoft (before I was radicalised - safety wink).
He has said himself that he should never have been allowed to get that rich, so amongst the new tech barons he’s one of the better ones (Larry Ellison spends his money on Mig-21s, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg are just inherently evil). I grudgingly admire what he’s done, but it’s not a repeatable model, because we have no way of knowing whether he just got lucky with his successes, or whether he might suddenly decide to invest in something that is less to the benefit of mankind (drones that kill poor people?) If the state controlled the investment then we could decide (using democracy) what it should get spent on, even if that is a fucking wall, sadly.
Compare him to the Koch brothers, who spend their billions trying to influence or even install their placemen in every major government and media outlet in the world (ooh - conspiracy theory, best leave that one for now).
Finally, the idea that governments are not as innovative as the private sector has also been proven false. There’s a great book by Mariana Mazzucatto called the Entrepreneurial State which shows that pretty much all the big tech companies only exist because of strategic investments in infrastructure by the state. Private capital is too short-termist to ever do that, so it waits until the government invests, then creams off the profits.
