[jacknews]

Come on, I don't believe Bezos would put on his slippers and retire to a country cottage because tax rates were too high.

While money is certainly an incentive to innovate, it's also not the only incentive (and probably far down the list if you're already rich), and creative, driven people will do what they do whether or not a chunk of their "earnings" gets given/taken back to the society that enables them to do it.

[diggernet]

True, but it's not just an incentive, it's also an enabler. SpaceX was on the verge of going broke, and their first successful launch was do or die. Had Musk been taxed more heavily before that, and had substantially less money to pour into the company, they likely would not have survived to make that launch.