[stzup7]

I don't think that's quite right. It's the same way Formula 1 racing contributes to regular automotive industry. Technological innovations could be adopted by more mainstream industries in a few years. For instance SolarFlare NICs used to be almost exclusively used by HFT players and can now be found in most CDNs or latency sensitive cloud providers.

[zarkov99]

The F1 comparison is not bad, but its not great either. F1's tech innovations are much more publicly visible (HFT shops are extremely secretive) and F1 has the added benefit of providing entertainment value to millions.