They dictate what their employees are paid to work on, there are no VC investments in The Julia Programming Language

It’s true that MIT and a few other organizations have more influence than others simply because they employ more developers with time/scope to work on the language. Just like every programming language.

But this becomes less true all the time. And most of the direction that is “paid for” is an unadulterated good: JuliaC ahead of time compilation has been requested for over a decade and has made enormous progress.