this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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Not a tech billionaire but otherwise James Cameron also matches that description. Actually Cameron is way more hardcore into "space is scary", and I "love deep sea" directions.
The man has actually combined the two! Avatar: go to space in order to go under water. The Abyss: Aliens come from space in order to live under water.
Cameron is much more into 'I love the deep sea', has more senoirity as a legitimate deep dive submersible expert, but Gabe is giving him a run for his money.
That yacht Gabe has?
He bought the shipyard so he could direct them to refit the yacht to also have a docking bay and facilities for a submersible, (and also a LAN party room lol) which he has since gone on to use to plumb the deep seas south of Japan, mapping various trench beds in high detail, and possibly capturing some never before seen hadal zone creatures on camera.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GsbYXGVSPmo
He is literally playing Subnautica IRL.
Gabe also funds actual legitimate neuroscience / medical brain implant research. Unlike Elon's Neuralink... which poached a PHD's research team and then basically stole and claimed credit for inventing a certain kind of brain implant tech... and then ran around saying he was gonna change the world with this half baked over hyped tech, untill he got bored / came down from ketamine...
Gabe is a bit more hands off and just actually lets the experts do expert things, try to discover and invent new ways to help people with Parkinsons and such... the goal isn't primarily to make money, it is to do research.
https://www.techspot.com/news/108049-valve-gabe-newell-backing-new-brain-chip-startup.html
He's closer to an old school American business tycoon... an actual philanthropist who has more money than he knows what to do with, so he throws it at things he thinks are neat and could contribute to society in some way.
Even Bill Gates, for all the shit he absolutely deserves to be criticized (if not imprisoned) for, he did and does throw a pretty substantial amount of money at cancer research, that has led to very useful research there.
Now, I still don't think billionaires should exist, but, they do. And at least some of them do less horribly bad things with some of their money than say, I dunno, directly fund and bankroll fascist politicians.
I was disappointed by The Way of Water. For a guy who's spent more time undersea than... basically anyone who isn't a navy soldier in a submarine... it doesn't really come across in the movie. I mean, we didn't even see coral bleaching! In what is supposed to be an anti-colonial environmental movie!
I guess whale hunting is an easier message to sell to the masses.
If you think his movies aren't all about the tech you need to think again.
In the past maybe, but the last two Avatar films didn't really push any new tech.
I don't know about the third one (I haven't even seen it), but the second one made huge advances in rendering water (among other things). There's a pretty interesting Corridor Crew video about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Gd0bR2kb4