Let me clarify what I meant. Sure, SpaceX is profitable. It has to be. But Elon right now seems to be using the economy to pursue his own goals with Tesla and SpaceX, but those goals are not dictated by what is profitable. He had to amass some capital and then basically force the economy to accept his visions. Tesla Motors pretty much created the market for electric cars that don't suck. SpaceX and Tesla were not economically viable concepts at the beginning.

The thought I wanted to express is that our economic system is an optimization process that shapes (and is shaped by, in a feedback loop) the progress of technology. It's the economy that decided we won't be having moon bases or jetpacks anytime soon, even though we could. It's the force that decides that a random photosharing app is worth more than feeding the poor or curing cancer.

Current economy as an optimization process was aligned with human values pretty well so far (though not perfectly; government regulations are one of the tools we use to try and fix that alignment). But as a greedy process (in the CS sense of the word), it often gets stuck in local optimas. That's where Elons, Brins, etc. come in - they have enough cash and vision to force us out of the local optimum and help find a better one.

Climate change, ensuring continous access to energy, making humanity an interplanetary species, giving everyone access to all knowledge of mankind, life extension, fighting disease and death. Stuff like that - things we all care about, but don't really do anything about them because they're not short-term profitable.

I don't mean to pass moral judgement here. I only observe that some of the most important problems we have don't yield themselves well to capitalism (which is sort of obvious - the ones that were important but compatibile with greedy optimization are the ones we already solved).