Luxury yachts and public transit make approximately 0 talent impact on the world.
Building each is an extremely tiny industry.
These are also very average talent required jobs.
To me it feels that overpriced items cause less trickle downs if they cost less to make: the delta would go into an oblivion. Trickle downs don't appear to be real, but less than already immeasurable sounds bad.
Like the other commenter said the larger issue is the monopolization (see groq x nvidia for a glaring example) and other forms of rent seeking that clamp down on market fairness and efficiency
I think mega yachts are stupid, that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist and to act like they are the same as even 20 years ago is willfully ignorant
We've all seen the comic where the villian tells Spider-Man "I don't want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs." I would respect that a hell of a lot more than whatever Bezos/Musk/Zuckerberg/etc are doing with their money. Hell, I'd settle for Howard Hughes levels of madness-mixed-with-genius.
Everyone just buys the same Billionaire Starter Pack these days consisting of ugly yachts and mansions, and the obligatory rocket company. The change is just spent on aggressive hoard-management and political machinations. Is their heart even in any of those ventures? When they wake up, so they say "I spent the first 40 years of my life selling my soul so I can do this, and it was so worth it?"
I know if you dropped twelve figures in my lap, I'd be saying things like "who can I hire to help me engineer an army of superintelligent dragon creatures" or "let's level Peoria, Arizona and rebuild it as a car-free zone with the density of midtown Mahnattan", not "let's buy Yahoo, because all the other depressing media outlets are spoken for already."
I don't claim that regulations are simple, and incentives couldn't be created to result in infrastructure investment by the wealthy... but I won't hold my breath.
But let's be serious. Ferries have a very limited use in only a few cities. Even then, the appeal is limited because they're relatively slow.
I submit that the most common result of replacing one yacht with $100m of public transit spending is that the unions and the bureaucracy will eat up the $100m in a few minutes.
The theory here is that diverting more smart people into "good" careers like urban planning will be great. But if we look at the last 100 years in the United States, the rise of careers like urban planning have been correlated with an explosion in construction costs.
Yet back in the bad old days when there weren't urban planning degrees and only a few effete twits went to college, private capitalism was able to build two big urban transit systems in NYC. No book smart people. Just sandhogs and profit motive. How much did it cost to add just a few stops to the NYC subway over the last two decades?
Also, I live near a city that had one of those ridiculous, way over budget projects where sure, some money was funneled to unions and bureaucracy or whatever evil monsters you've concocted here. No amount of billionaire pet projects could match the amount of good it did across the number of people it affected. Sometimes the inefficiencies of human cooperation are greased with money, and that's perfectly fine.