How can one literally buy time (from x-risk) with money?

Excellent question. I think it's very hard to buy time as the main way to do this would be to persuade top researchers to stop pursuing capabilities research, but these people are very busy, hard to access, have high standards for arguments and have strong incentives to continue what they are doing.

Even though some of those interventions may buy time, the way that they do it seems to be rather indirect which makes me very uncertain of the extent to which they would buy us time. Part of me wonders whether "buying time" is even the correct frame for many of these interventions. For example, with demonstrating concerning capabilities, perhaps we should be thinking about these in terms of optionality value? The demonstration is sufficient to grow the movement somewhat, but it also increases the expected return on effort invested in movement-building.