Well, that's just it. The kind of power that I think hackers crave is the kind that you can't buy with money.
Even if you had billions of dollars to throw at the problem, you could never be as relevant a figure in shaping the face of technology as Turing or von Neuman were. They created the ideas that are at the very core of so much that we do. You can't invent something again, and money isn't the tool you use to invent stuff :)
The shallow, transitory sort of power certainly can be bought. You can use money to make people do things. But you can't think with money, so it doesn't give you the power to have powerful thoughts, and THAT'S what changes the world.
That kind of power can obviously be turned into money, though.
Even if you had billions of dollars to throw at the problem, you could never be as relevant a figure in shaping the face of technology as Turing or von Neuman were. They created the ideas that are at the very core of so much that we do. You can't invent something again, and money isn't the tool you use to invent stuff :)
The shallow, transitory sort of power certainly can be bought. You can use money to make people do things. But you can't think with money, so it doesn't give you the power to have powerful thoughts, and THAT'S what changes the world.
That kind of power can obviously be turned into money, though.