A growing cohort of tech billionaires is focused on etching their imprints on extraterrestrial realms. Elon Musk wants to create a moon base and send humans to Mars. Jeff Bezos is testing a massive new rocket for outer space. And Jared Isaacman, the aerospace entrepreneur and Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, backs colonizing Mars.
Exciting ventures all, but in their gumption, they've lost perspective on an opportunity here on planet Earth. The American heartland is increasingly isolated from the innovation economies that made such billionaires so wealthy. Musk, Bezos, Isaacman, and other tech billionaires should harness their immense power and contribute to a bold project at home: helping heartland cities reinvent themselves for the 21st century. The payoff from sparking Midwestern economic moonshots that create good-paying jobs may not be as romantic as playing out some Star Trek fantasy, but America needs tech billionaires to step into a more civic-minded role—and the rewards are likely to be profound.
Enduring legacies
In previous generations, industry titans harbored their own big dreams at the vanguard of innovation. During Cornelius Vanderbilt’s lifetime, steamship races on the Hudson River were a source of public spectacle. Despite the monopolies that made robber barons like Vanderbilt rich, many of their audacious investments were accompanied by a separate and contemporaneous wish to pull the whole of society up along with them. (Vanderbilt would go on to seed the Nashville university named in his honor.) The landmarks such barons left America reflected their desire to extend a ladder back down to those being left behind by technological change.
Today, the absence of any similar impulse is working to sobering effect. The decay across the middle of America isn’t just bad for those who feel trapped there in cycles of downward mobility—it also presents an opportunity for those billionaire investors and philanthropists to establish a positive legacy. Rather than look to the stars, they should seize the opportunity under their noses.
I speak from experience. In 2019, I founded Tulsa Innovation Labs, an economic development organization supported by oil tycoon George Kaiser and his family foundation. With a $6 billion endowment, Kaiser’s philanthropy is transforming Tulsa by diversifying the region’s oil and gas economy and catalyzing an innovation ecosystem. In addition to Tulsa Innovation Labs, Kaiser has funded Tulsa Remote, an incentive program attracting remote tech workers to northeast Oklahoma; Build in Tulsa, which supports Black startup founders; and the Atlas School, a coding bootcamp. After a new approach to economic development and public, private, and social sector investment, the region is expected to grow at least 20,000 tech jobs over the next decade—about a third of which are attainable without a bachelor’s degree.
Investing in middle America
Tulsa is a shining example of what could happen if some of the country’s 800-plus billionaires began launching moonshots here at home and then began holding each other accountable for following through as civic leaders. The needs are desperate. In the world of technology, AI is all the rage—the next frontier in a perpetual desire to disrupt less productive patterns in the economy and solve intractable scientific problems.
But for most of America, the labor market disruptions that could result from AI are a rumbling source of terror. For all that upheaval is celebrated by techies in New York, Seattle, and Boston, it’s viewed as a looming scourge in St. Louis, Cleveland, and Kansas City. And that is casting a generalized pall over the heartland that has been decades in the making.
In places that thrived through the post-World War II era, the working class is hurting, and the middle class is shrinking. The tech economy feels as distant as Mars. But those places would flourish again if their potential was recognized and cultivated in a smart and judicious way with a bit more investment from those otherwise focused on the stratosphere.
Supporting entrepreneurs
First, those interested in reinventing the heartland need to pursue the goal strategically—this can’t be done as a slapdash effort driven solely by personal interests. Chicago’s economy is enormous, for example, but it lags behind coastal peers in tech. Billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker’s nonprofit P33, an inclusive growth organization she launched, has crafted a targeted strategy to bolster a deepening well of innovation and entrepreneurship in quantum, biotechnology, and decarbonization—clusters ripe for growth in the Windy City. Chicago already boasts great hospitals and universities. Pritzker, who served as U.S. Commerce Secretary in the Obama admin, is weaving those existing assets into a new tech community and creating accessible pathways for Chicagoans to benefit from it.
Second, resources need to be deployed on a systematic basis, not as one-off and disconnected projects. Just as communities are interdependent, so too are innovation ecosystems. Universities, financiers, entrepreneurs, and more need one another to grow together. When the Walton Family decided to breathe new life into Northwest Arkansas, they not only invested in the local university and workforce system, but they also funded Right to Start, an initiative to support entrepreneurs from underserved communities, and built networks connecting founders, mentors, capital, and talent. To build an entrepreneurial culture, they needed to support several nodes of regional life, and in doing so, are proving that there’s real tech potential in rural parts of America.
Finally, investors should summon the courage to make big, early bets, on the expectation that others will follow if they do. The most significant barrier for most heartland cities in transitioning legacy economies to tech is in attracting their first significant backer. After Bill Ford Jr., the great-grandson son of Henry Ford, founded Michigan Central, Detroit’s 30-acre epicenter for tech and innovation, the city and state showed a new willingness to invest, and then Google entered with another major investment. Absent a commitment to Detroit’s future and that first green light from Ford, it’s not clear that the other investments would have materialized.
A more prosperous U.S.
Ventures in the cosmos and the heartland need not be mutually exclusive—but the balance of investment in these two distinct realms needs to change, and fast. America’s geography of innovation is dangerously skewed. Concentrating wealth and opportunity on the coasts leaves the nation vulnerable to economic and social instability, while limiting our global competitiveness.
Billionaires have the power to build a more resilient, equitable, and prosperous America; to do so, they should work with heartland cities in the spirit of collaboration, not colonization. The question they must ask themselves is simple: Do they want their legacies to be defined by vanity projects, or do they want to be remembered for reviving the American Dream? Mars can wait. America’s heartland cannot.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
