Almost all of these elite private universities were started by random rich people and gained prestige over time. Modern rich people seem unambitious compared to people in the past. People forget that Harvard and Stanford are named after people, they weren't always these giant institutions
Actually building something for the future, not because it will make you even richer, seems to have fallen out of favor.
Besides SpaceX, not sure what other goods there have been from this social contract recently.
If one day we do end up with colonies on the Moon and/or Mars, historians will point to SpaceX's drastic lowering of the cost of making it to orbit as one of the critical stepping stones that made it happen. Not only does it directly make such things more possible, but it increases the amount of economic activity that can occur in space, which grows the entire industrial ecosystem and indirectly unlocks even more possibilities in the long run.
Now, with transportation across the country taking mere hours rather than months, a new college would have to compete with every college in the country.
On top of that, you need to deal with accreditation and lots of other red tape to even get to the point where you could start attracting the talent that is being rejected, meaning you are competing with top state schools and next-tier private schools.
And perhaps that's for the best, sometimes when well-meaning billionaires try new things we just end up with wacky dystopian shit at our expense, like Munger Hall : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXd7Y3HvUj4
I'd rather give billionaires the option to waste their money on yachts and meaningless trips to orbit, or give money to charity, than force that largely insecure, incompetent demographic into actual leadership positions. Would be like handing a machine gun to a pissed off chimp that just had its mate stolen.
Case in point, look at the account holders of Silicon Valley Bank who had essentially their entire corporate cash reserves, billions collectively, at that one institution. Frankly they all should have been wiped out down to the FDIC limit for such foolishness, but I'm sure as most rich people do they have a mountain of excuses. These people are largely not competent, they took stupid risks and got lucky, but the same stupidity that made them take the risks tends to stick around after they get lucky. Steve Jobs himself had the good fortune to get the rare CURABLE variety of pancreatic cancer, detected early no less, and he turned down standard treatment in favor of some new-age juice-diet bullshit. His stupidity cost him his life, and all the wealth in the world meant nothing. Thank God he never thought to open up a hospital based on his beliefs.
Endowment money is a really long term play and probably comes from old money rather than new money 99% of the time
I think most people rich enough to pull this can afford to buy their kids into Harvard/Stanford so it would take someone with a real principled interest in this approach.
Starting a research university (which you need to attract top professors) from scratch seems really challenging though because you need to build up your grants and either poach existing professors or hire junior ones. You could start a teaching or liberal arts university but a lot of students who want to go on to PHDs or take advanced classes would skip based on that.
They don't have to use it except as collateral for loans.
I was disturbed back when Donald Trump was elected that one of the strains of opposition was "he can't function as president because he owns businesses. He should just own stock like a real politician."
The supposed concern is that, if you have an actual business going, you may experience conflicts of interest between your business and your political decisions. But (1) categorically excluding anyone who does productive work from holding office is a really terrible (if historically common) idea; and (2) it's not like we never hear complaints about politicians getting into conflicts of interest between their political decisions and their stockholdings.