[toohotatopic]

How do you create planetary structures but with super-companies and rich people?

People don't innovate by themselves. The workers and/or engineers of the US or the world could have pooled their money and built AWS or space rockets, or electric cars. But they haven't. It takes money and actions from few people to get stuff done.

[starfallg]

You are conflating innovation with disruption.

Space rockets - done before by the state. Commercialising it is disruption.

Electric cars - done before and lost in the market due to battery tech (lithium tech research has been funded also publicaly)

AWS - co-opting open source software and turning it into a service isn't exactly innovation. But scaling it up to such a degrees is market disruption.

You don't need huge amount of capital to be innovative, people naturally are. But you need a system to roll-out innovations and when you do this at scale, it becomes disruptive. VC and tech giant funding brings this forward but societal change is mainly driven by technology, not by capital.

[praptak]

They have, in the form of government programs. Moon exploration or the internet didn't need super-companies or ultra rich people.

[function_seven]

And private programs can still succeed without extracting every last bit of margin for the owners.

Governments can create and fund programs to do these large-scale projects. They can also leave it to private industry to do so as well, but with strong protections for workers, the unions they may want to form, and the living conditions of all participants (employee, supplier, miner, etc.), domestic and foreign.

[callamdelaney]

Didn't NASA pay private companies billions to build and provide a significant proportion of the hardware, software and science required for these missions?