I'm not about to say that this is as noble as curing cancer- but then again, the skills aren't one to one. Generally the kinds of people who are able to think at such a high level strategically for a business, have very different ways of thinking from those who do hard science. Science is slow, arduous, and full of rigor in a way that would probably make Neal into a mediocre scientist at best. Things that Neal accomplishes at Google in a week, he wouldn't see movement on as a scientist in his lifetime. They require different sorts of people.

Not to mention- while he is getting paid a monstrous sum of money, think of how many people he is also enabling to have jobs, both at Google and the businesses that use their services. The direct effect is obviously very different, but I'd bet he does a lot of good for the world in his own way.

Equally plausible to the 'providing value' theory are several possible scenarios of externalities that can't be mentioned without asbestos underwear. And as for thinking about how many jobs a person is enabling, we'll just call that the 'dear leader' argument.

Ads are also the thing that enables really amazing things to exist. Regardless of your feelings about facebook, the community it has created has had drastic impacts on the world at large. Almost the entire knowledge of humanity is now in anyone's grasp with a simple click of a button (Google). That was only possible because Google was able to make money off of it through ads. How do you propose that the internet pay for its self without ads? The whole freedom of the internet is because they can make money off of ads.

Not everyone needs to cure cancer to do something great.

What's deeply ironic is the modern internet is bankrolled by brand trademark monopolies, but programmed by a bunch of people who complain about government-granted monopolies...

There's a quote from the 1950's from a judge very skeptical of extending trademark law to the effect of "we shouldn't allow building brands too much, because then people will buy things for reasons other than product quality and that'll undermine competition in the marketplace by making products non-fungible."

I personally like monopolies,[1] so it's cool with me, but you have to wonder what the internet would look like if Adidas sold shoes and not "footwear experiences."

[1] There is no profit in perfectly competitive industries, and thus no money to do cool stuff. That's why, e.g., Microsoft is so screwed. It keeps hoping for innovation out of companies like Acer, Lenovo, Asus, etc, that have profit margins of just a few %.

'cure cancer' was just a placeholder for anything of greater importance to the human condition. However, maybe you are onto something. Maybe ads are indeed the lifeblood of the new interconnected, networked world of century 21 and beyond. I guess nobody figured out a better way to sustain life on the 'internets'. Yet...

This guy facilitated the ads that support google's wide range of quality services given free to anyone anywhere in the world. Google maps alone has had a positive humanitarian impact to a great many people. It's not the stereotypical marketing exec in an advertising company that only makes adverts.

Find a way to cure cancer while serving ads and you'll be both rich and famous.

EDIT: This sounds snarkier than I meant it to, sorry. I agree that there are many things that I look at and I think "This is nuts!" - like how cheap products are that get mass produced in China. Someone gets oil from a deep sea well; refines it, turns it into plastic, ships it to a factory, who do stuff with it, put it in a box, put all those into other boxes, ship it, distribute it locally, someone takes all the little boxes out of the big boxes and puts them on display, and I can buy this for a couple of dollars.

Yes, it's weird that we spend millions on Barbie dolls, and not so much on cancer or malaria or HIV or hunger.

It's reasonably likely that a good chunk of the $100m will end up going to charity, which would go a lot further toward curing cancer or whatever the charity is focused on.

Or perhaps angel investing- funding the next wave of innovation.