Ironically, Clarke was a major donor. Other donors to the SETI Institute include some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley.

Your belief that only governments do research and speculative investment is wrong. The idea of government-funded science was almost unknown until the 20th century, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) is only three years older than I am.

Bowser mentioned Bell Labs, one example among many of private pure research that created many of our modern technologies. The vast majority of R&D today is privately funded, as I showed in another thread. The R&D budget of Microsoft alone is $2 billion larger than the entire 2014 NSF budget request.

"Profit" means there is more wealth at the other end of a process than you started out with. This is not a bad thing, especially when there is now so much demand for programs that eat more wealth than they produce.