I'll argue that "An expansive vision that's not about money" is a bug and not a feature unless there is a good story about money that can sustain that expansive vision.
(flailing here, to get Tomte in on this, don't mind me :)
supportive case studies abound in open source-- Valve saving desktop Linux most obviously..
(Possible "the-house-that-Jack-built" counterexample is, ofc, Linus & his kernel-- it even screws with the Microsoft latent framing! Srsly, what's the monystory there?)
More productively: riffing on Jobs' "if you care about sw you must work on hw", here's another "pecuny-agnostic" approach
If you care about turning academics self-sufficient, you must help the self-sufficient pursue academics without disappearing into the usual failure modes (quackery, irrelevance, Bryan Johnson, Sam Altman, PG, Peter Thiel?!?! etc)
The organizational issues are much the same, the relative stakes are .. interesting[0]. See the fraught debate following Terry Tao's very recent tacit endorsement of BigTech*
*I gather that Tao not keeping those livecoding tubes on tap may indicate that he's seriously considering the issues raised therein
[0] .. than in the case of sports[1]: the mass appeal of μάθημα, to be (insanely?) charitable, is debatable, but the power potentiality, esp. when integrated over time[3], isn't[4].
(Sorry if Grothendieck/Teddy was channeled, not too inadvertently..)
[1] blissfully ignoring the uh not insignificant cases of Olympic horsemen turning into field marshals
[3] The Altman interval, of elite historiographers (or history-makers): exactly one thousand years
[4] "fungible" "commodity", hmmm..
gets back to your original point... Nonfungible visions?
