Instead of charity, if the billionaires or super smarts like gates, larry/sergey, bezos,pg etc can live in ordinary people situations for 2-3 days a year, their imagination will fuel creations that benefit all. Is this not tried already ?
And there are a lot of ways that rich people can't actually get anything more special than anyone else, at least not easily. It's not feasible to build hospitals just for rich people, so a billionaire goes to the same hospitals as ordinary people. Consumer electronics don't generally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so a billionaire has the same kind of stuff ordinary people have.
Indeed. I've run into Steve three times. Twice we were both shopping for produce at a natural food store (Country Sun in Palo Alto, and the old Richard's Natural Foods in Los Gatos).
The last time was just a year ago. I sat down for dinner on the patio at La Strada, a nice Italian restaurant on University Avenue a few doors down from the Palo Alto Apple store, and there were Steve and his daughter at the next table. After dinner they took a stroll down University Avenue, just the two of them. I imagine they were probably going to get some frozen yogurt. I thought to myself, "Doesn't he have some security? A bodyguard? Something?"
There are a lot of Silicon Valley executives who I'd recognize if I saw them. But Steve is the only one who I've ever run into doing ordinary things like produce shopping.
He redesigned things around his hospital room because he had a pad and pencil, and he was bored. There's no reason to believe that the X-ray machine he drew was better than the X-ray machines designed by X-ray machine designers with a better idea of the details and tradeoffs involved with designing X-ray machines. And that's no insult to Steve, because I'm sure he knew that too -- he was just drawing for the sake of drawing.