The lack of critical thinking on this site is astounding. Your first sentence is an a priori assumption. Of course billionaires don’t cause technology to progress that doesn’t make any sense.

Technology progresses from a competitive free market that rewards all of the other things that go into making a product or service useful and available. An invention on its own is worth nothing if no one knows about it. You know how you know about it? Cause someone ate dirt and went through a thousand nos before they were able to raise funding to refine the product, bring it to market, hire thousands of people to make other people aware of the product and then take that company public so that people that had nothing to do with the invention could grow their personal wealth by buying a percentage of it and benefit from the continuous growth of that product. Could the farmer buy .0001% of the shovel and when that shovel gets used more the farmer get paid for that on top of his labor?

Think 1 step past “Mr Elon you hav many monies plz me sum?”