(Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)
Elon Musk.

Two billionaire events happened last week. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, said they'd give away most of their wealth, and Elon Musk renewed his call for a carbon tax.

Zuckerberg and Musk want to change the world. Some have argued that by creating Facebook, Zuckerberg already has. I might argue that Musk hasn't. Yet.

But that doesn't mean he won't ultimately change it in far more profound ways. And Chan and Zuckerberg should study him closely as they look to deploy their family's resources, which will stand at about $45 billion.

Though Musk has given away some of his money, the thrust of his change-the-world vision has come from investment in his companies: Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City. When he got very rich after the sale of PayPal to eBay, he took — as he often explains it — all of his money and sank it into those three enterprises.

Too risky to succeed?

Speaking in Paris last week, he stressed that he wasn't initially looking for outside investors in Tesla or SpaceX because he thought both companies were likely to fail. Cars and rockets are risky enterprises. Along with Solar City, they were huge bets on a transformed future, as well as means to ends: an acceleration of the societal move away from fossil-fuel dependency, and a way to "back up the biosphere" and become a "multi-planetary" species.

And note that Musk is demanding a carbon tax because he grasps that Tesla and Solar City can't do it on their own — only government action can make carbon so expensive that the alternatives become mainstream.

Chan and Zuckerberg are leaving themselves the opportunity to do something similar by setting up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as an LLC rather than a conventional nonprofit foundation. To explain the move, Zuckerberg wrote that the structure "enables us to pursue our mission by funding non-profit organizations, making private investments and participating in policy debates — in each case with the goal of generating a positive impact in areas of great need." So they can use some of the money to take risks and fund startups that might make big things happen fast.

(Mark Zuckerberg)
Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and their daughter.

They're not alone in thinking that investment for good is perhaps more effective than giving for good. Google's Larry Page said last year that he would rather give his wealth to Musk than distribute it the old-fashioned way. But what they haven't yet outlined is the kind of mad vision that drives Musk.

Ten years ago, if you had said that this guy Musk would offer a viable alternative to NASA space missions while at the same time establishing a relatively successful, all-electric car company, you would have been told you were 100% nuts.