Particle physics just got its Elon Musk moment, and nobody seems bothered that we're basically GoFundMe-ing the secrets of the universe.

CERN taking a billion dollars in private cash for the Future Circular Collider isn't a feel-good story about philanthropic billionaires saving science. It's the latest sign that we've collectively decided governments are too broke, too slow, or too stupid to fund the things that built the modern world. From the Manhattan Project to ARPANET to the superconducting supercollider that got canceled in '93 because Congress couldn't stomach the price tag, fundamental research used to be what nation-states did. Now it's what they outsource to whoever has a 10-figure exit and a God complex.

Look at the pattern. SpaceX is building the rockets. Anthropic and OpenAI are racing toward AGI on VC money. Alphabet's Calico is trying to cure aging. Now particle physics joins the club. Every domain that used to require the full faith and credit of a superpower treasury is getting Kickstarted by people who made their money optimizing ad clicks and cloud infrastructure. We're not even pretending anymore that public funding for moonshots is coming back.

The comfortable narrative is that this is good actually – private money moves faster, cares about results, doesn't get bogged down in bureaucracy. And sure, SpaceX builds rockets cheaper than NASA. But here's what everyone's missing: when you fund fundamental research with private capital, you fundamentally change what gets researched and who decides. Government-funded science had to justify itself to voters and committees, which was annoying but democratic. Private-funded science justifies itself to donors, which is efficient but autocratic. You really think a tech billionaire's priorities perfectly align with humanity's? The people writing checks get to pick which mysteries of physics are worth solving.

And it gets weirder when you think about what CERN actually does. They're not building a product. They're smashing particles together to understand the fundamental structure of reality. The Higgs boson didn't unlock a new revenue stream – it unlocked knowledge. That used to be reason enough. Now you need a pitch deck explaining how discovering supersymmetric particles might eventually lead to something commercializable, or at least impressive enough to get your name on a building.

The really uncomfortable question nobody's asking: what happens when the private money gets bored? Government funding was stable, predictable, boring. Private funding comes with vibes. One market crash, one portfolio rebalancing, one donor deciding they'd rather put their money into longevity research or charter cities, and suddenly you're mothballing a half-built particle accelerator that cost 30 years and a hundred countries to plan. You can't exactly pivot a 100-kilometer underground ring to crypto infrastructure.

This isn't doom-posting about billionaires – some of them genuinely care about advancing human knowledge. But we're running an experiment here, and not the physics kind. We're testing whether the things that operate on 50-year timelines and produce zero financial returns can survive in an era when even venture capital thinks a 10-year horizon is patient. We're betting that the richest people on earth will stay interested in questions that might not have answers in their lifetimes.

Twenty years from now, when every major research institution has a donor wing and a naming-rights controversy, we'll look back at this moment and realize we sleepwalked into a new social contract. Science used to be a public good funded by taxpayers. Now it's a philanthropic vanity project funded by liquidity events.

How's that working out for journalism and the arts?