megamillions

Probably need billions but, if there were a silver bullet product to work on, it would be the creation of a very small electric or similar powerplant that could be swapped in for the existing engine in a car.

google bet

I made a (modest) bet this week that google does not want to be a search company.  Rather, Page and Brin have very large goals that they are using search to finance.  And, eventually, from all of the different efforts the company makes, it will come up with another disruptive leading product.  That could only have been financed from the outsized profits from search.  The efforts on self-driving cars, space elevators, and machine translation all point towards using the freedom that comes from improbable amounts of money to break rapidly through barriers to next generation technologies.