My PhD process put me in direct contact, every day, with people who had access to massive sums of money and facilities. Mainly this is the distinction between a self trained scientist and a PhD. The PhD is allowed to be a professional scientist because they have gone through the hoops and demonstrated, in a controlled environment, that you are capable of developing an independent project and carrying out unique research.
The PhD process doesn't mean much more than that you're almost ready to seek to be a professional scientist. It's basically a certification that shows you're serious about being a scientist. Engineers apply generalized mathematical toolset to solve a problem defined by someone else. Scientists develop new information about the cosmos.
If you want to get funding for a scientific project from sources other than your parents or a bank loan or for other work, you're going to want a PhD. PhD professors will be handed hundreds of thousands, millions, and sometimes even billions of dollars (in the case of designing things like massive gravitational interferometers and particle accelerators) for research projects. A PhD is really the first step in a long road to that kind of recognition in the field.
