Tech Billionaires’ Craziest Inventions—And Which Ones Might Actually Save the World

Tech billionaires don’t just launch “revolutionary” apps anymore—they’ve moved on to reinventing reality itself. Today’s tech titans dream far bigger than social platforms or sleek gadgets. They’re experimenting with private mini-nuclear reactors to power future cities, designing AI systems that could rewrite how societies function, and even building floating, self-governing micronations in the middle of the ocean. What once sounded like sci-fi now shows up in patent filings, investor decks, and real construction sites.

Some of these projects promise clean energy, medical breakthroughs, or radical climate solutions. Others feel like billionaire-sized vanity quests, bold experiments with unpredictable consequences. Either way, they’re happening—funded, prototyped, and inching toward reality.

Here’s a guided tour through ten of the wildest ideas currently under development, each one strange enough to sound fictional yet serious enough to potentially reshape the world as we know it.

Elon Musk’s brain-chip “Neuralink” experiment

Neuralink is Musk’s brain-computer interface company that implants a chip with super-thin electrodes into the brain to read neural activity and send it to a computer. In early 2024, Musk said the first human patient, a paralyzed man, had fully recovered from surgery and could move a computer mouse on a screen with the power of thought, which is crazy, if true.

In a later case, a paralyzed woman used the implant to write her name on a screen for the first time in about 20 years, again by controlling a cursor purely with her mind. And the most recent example was a man controlling a flying drone. Despite the short-lived success and the drone’s crash, small victories like these hold significance.  Neuralink’s stated goal is to help people with severe paralysis communicate and interact with computers more easily, with longer-term ambitions like treating neurological conditions.