By the time Elon Musk founded the company that would become PayPal, in 1999, he had already built and sold one internet business. But this time he hit the jackpot.

Already wealthier than most of us will ever dream of being, he netted close to $180 million from PayPal’s sale to eBay, enough to retire at the age of 32, or to set up a venture capital fund and invest in hungry young entrepreneurs such as he once was – the conventional path for made men in California’s Silicon Valley.

But this is not what Musk did. Since the birth of the public internet in the mid-1990s, there have been complaints that, with the best minds of a generation focused either on finding new ways to play the stock market or on tinkering with software, the big picture was being lost.