You make a good point - there really is no way to fully disconnect the human element in these decisions.
I do think there's a real difference between Jeff Bezos/etc founding a space-travel company and Facebook buying Instagram, however. Although Mark Zuckerberg is at the top, Facebook is a large organization, with likely more complex motivations than any individual.
To what extent does it even make sense to speak of the "motivations" of a group of people, insofar as they aren't unanimous? Has anyone done a study on whether this provides any predictive power? It seems plausible to me that a group's "motivations" are just stories about what people in the group did.
I do think there's a real difference between Jeff Bezos/etc founding a space-travel company and Facebook buying Instagram, however. Although Mark Zuckerberg is at the top, Facebook is a large organization, with likely more complex motivations than any individual.