[neuromantik8086]

In an ideal world, I'd agree with you. In the real world, government funding (at least in the US) is often administered by bureaucrats without relevant scientific expertise to ensure proper oversight. Furthermore, the checks and balances for grant awards are lacking at the NIH/NSF/etc. The panels who decide who gets funding and who doesn't comprise researchers who are far from disinterested judges. Some grant approvals are less about scientific merit and more about rubbing elbows with the right people, which ultimately means that political capital becomes more important than substance in a lot of cases. I've seen large grants funded for experiments that from a methodological standpoint, made no sense, and yet the PIs who submitted the proposal were well-established and had connections.

Corporate science, in contrast, just wants results that work and earn money and as a result is more geared towards weeding out fruitless avenues of research. My general impression is that this is sometimes at the expense of creativity, since companies are more risk-averse generally speaking, which limits what is discovered to mostly non-sexy stuff. I also suspect (but am not certain) that replications are performed more routinely, and are just file-drawered / kept as trade secrets and that the current reproducibility crises in some fields (such as cancer research) have been known about for a while in industry.

Rich people just want to cure cancer, childhood obesity, condition X that afflicts them personally. It's hard to get funding for just basic research because philanthropists generally lean towards the applied side of things as well and don't go for the moonshots. It's not the best, but typically there's some common ground for researchers to get money out of them (or some way to make basic research look applied to an undiscerning eye).