What would you have done with the money if you had the chance? Would you have bought a yacht, enjoyed tropical drinks and relaxed? Or do this?
True, when we were stuck in traffic on the way back to NYC, Adeo asked me what I was going to do after PayPal/X and I said I always wanted to do something to advance space, but didn’t think there was anything private individuals could do.
The origin of SpaceX was doing a philanthropic mission to get the public excited about life on Mars, so that NASA’s budget could be increased to achieve that goal. There was no commercial ambition at the time.
The $50M was from the proceeds of the sale of PayPal to eBay.
After learning more about the limiting factors for humanity in space, it became obvious that the issue was a lack of advancement in rocket technology, in particular the failure to develop a fully reusable rocket, without which expanding consciousness beyond Earth is impossible.