R&D is a bit different than science. Usually it has a time horizon of 3-10 years to commercialization, sometimes 10-20 at the high end. While much of science is in the 10-100 range. The 20-year patent window is crucially important for industry R&D. The timeframe can be extended a bit by keeping things as trade secrets, if you're very careful, but it gets trickier. Unpredictable and non-application-specific research also tends to be disfavored: improvement on a chemical process is one thing, since it has a clear path to application in a specific area that the company does business in. But new basic physics results are not favored, since it's not clear whether they will lead to profitable applications at all; and even if there was some way of knowing they would, those applications might not be easy for the company to take advantage of if they don't align with its business.

You couldn't directly build a product on Einstein's major results, for example, certainly not within the time window of patent protection (if they were even hypothetically patentable), but they were hugely important anyway. Same with much of the mid-20th-century materials-science work that is now proving useful to chip manufacturers: the tech industry didn't fund that research in the 1950s-70s, because they didn't know at the time which physics results would be useful to them in 2010s chip engineering. But they're definitely using them now! It's important to the tech industry that this pipeline of not-sure-where-this-will-be-applied basic research exists, because it's hard to do things like improving manufacturing processes unless there is an existing understanding of how physics and materials work in the first place. But the case for them funding it directly is weaker, because it tends to have the property that advancing the general level of knowledge benefits everyone, not only you, and you don't know decades in advance which specific knowledge you'll eventually need, anyway.