What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?
One thing to point out:  Oil is still _huge_ when it comes to investment and sheer amount of financing available.    Anything involving large-scale finance will have oil money involved in it in some way.<p>Frankly, even at the height of the tech boom, the tech industry has never had significant capital available compared to the oil industry.  I've worked in both... Folks in tech think 100 million in capital is a lot.  In oil, that doesn't even qualify as a project that needs sign-off by upper management.  (The last project I managed had a ~$200 million per year budget.  I was a low-level peon 5 years out of grad school in charge of it because it wasn't considered a large enough project budget-wise to give to someone experienced.  There are a few caveats around this -- the discretionary budget was on the order of 10 million and the rest was fixed through long-term contracts, but still...)<p>Significant investments in the energy industry are measured in tens of billions per project.  Profits from each of those projects are in the trillions, but spread out over 20-100 years.<p>As a result, a big chunk of the finance industry is directly or indirectly tied to oil.  There aren't many funds that don't have money somehow invested in or sourced from the energy industry.