Membership to the royal society is judged via candidates having made 'a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science'.
Seems you kind of need people who are capable and willing to do both. Not too many Bruce Wayne’s and Tony Starks outside the comic books and movies who are able to both think and spend.
Musk’s value to science and technological progress is not his scientific intellect. Musk’s value is his ability to invest gobs of money in smart people and be patient for years for the returns on his investment to occur…and to be willing to fail.
I’m sure he is an asshole and I don’t care what political tribe he follows. I watch rockets fly into space pretty much weekly from my backyard. Feels like every third car is a Tesla on the road. His investment patience has had value to society.
In fairness, Blue Origin has had only a tenth to a half of the funding that SpaceX has had (depending on which sources you trust; figures vary widely). Yet they are hardly doing badly by any measure: they have an almost fully reusable sub-orbital spacecraft which has consistently and safely carried passengers, and they have a orbital rocket ready for testing next month. SpaceX are clearly the market leader, but this is partially because they are into the category of companies who can now convey profitable payloads for NASA/DoD, with the public funding which goes along with that.
Technologically, SpaceX are miles (per second!) ahead of Blue Origin, but in business terms there is perhaps not a great difference between them. First-mover's advantage doesn't often translate into return-on-investment!
Well, the ability to identify talent is itself a talent. The skills for identifying talent may be relatively unaligned with demands of the field in which one is identifying talent, but I figure it's helpful to be at least competent in the domain where you're trying to pick winners. In "star driven" fields like music, film, or sports, you can make a good living off the ability to identify (and perhaps nurture) talent which you yourself don't have.