I feel like there was a moment where “love was all you needed” and people just followed their passions with real careers as a backup. Hollywood pressed that view (or echoed it) into the zeitgeist and I’m not sure what the turning point was, but people started getting filthy rich. Almost as if the dormant culture combined with the internet made it possible to amass an absurd amount of wealth. Since then, whenever that is, it feels like it’s socially acceptable again to do be driven by earning potential and nothing else.

I agree with you, wanting to become “filthy rich” is abhorrent given all of the known implications that comes with. At the very least people should have some shame and keep that to themselves.

Getting rich and making the world better are not incompatible, or even unaligned in general.

You get rich by offering a good or service that society desires.

No, that only makes you well-off.

You get filthy rich by capturing as much of the market as possible by whatever means necessary and killing off competition - including user lock-in, artificial bundling, using successful past products to subsidize non-profitable new ones just to screw competitors etc.

Now this is going to be a fruitful conversation.

Which one did Google founders do to get filthy rich?

Well, you're right, initially Google is a great example of growing because it genuinely was a great well executed product whose time had come. I mean it was just such a fresh air to go from using Excite and asking Jeeves to just googling it.

> user lock-in, artificial bundling,

But eventually Google hit its peak and has had to for the last decade or so concern itself with just maintaining its monopoly position, and it's done a lot of shady things to abet that, if you recall from reading the news over the last decade. A few I recall offhand.

* The infamous developer wage fixing scheme! Remember when it was uncovered that Apple and Google had been secretly and informally following no-poaching and wage cap rules to try to use their market power against developers?

* Monopolizing the ad marketplace by constant mergers and acquisitions (eg DoubleClick)

* Just generally using M&A and hiring as an anti competitive tool, eg acquihiring, overhiring, acquire-and-shut-down, etc -- hiring and acquiring not as a way to legitimately add profitable capabilities but instead merely as a way to tie up valuable limited resources (devs) and thus deny oxygen to potential competition.

* Don't get me started on how they're currently abusing Chromebooks to infiltrate the schools and get kids hooked on watching addictive YouTube Shorts and otherwise being good online ad targets during class time

And I'm sure all the other usual monopolistic behavior companies in their position are often tempted into. Google's challenge has been that by the 2010s, there wasn't really anything left for it to innovate in that could possibly come close to adding more than a rounding error's worth of profit to the huge ad machine.

So since then Google has fundamentally been more like a petrostate or a traditional utility company or something -- just protect the cash cow at all costs and don't rock the boat otherwise. It still kept and continues to try to keep to wear the costume of its earlier younger hip innovative days, but I think that's falling away as a new generation grows up who now sees them as part of the Man, an institution that's been there forever and no longer have a memory of the days when they were new, fun, innovative, countercultural.

In summary, Google didn't do shady things to get filthy rich, but it did do shady things later to stay filthy rich once it became clear there was nothing else left to do but either that, or watch the business gradually decline and get eaten by newer, hungrier startups and competitors.

Drug lords are making the world better?

Isn't Cannabis now a socially accepted and provided good in much of the Western world?

They said not incompatible, not that they are always compatible.

It's controversial, but many would say that dispensaries make the world a better place.

Getting people to pay for something isn't the same thing as making the world a better place. You'd need to figure out all the effects and costs of the service to know if you're doing good or bad. Tobacco companies sell things that a lot of people desire, but the effect on society is surely negative. Same could be true for social media and many other types of services, but we don't know because we're not really trying to figure that out. The only question we ask when we are starting a business is "are people willing to pay for this enough to make a profit?". We don't ask if the effect of that service is actually good for society or the world.

It's not the same and there are plenty of counterexamples, but it's aligned more often than not.

People want to stay in touch with those they love.

People want to have medicines to improve their stress.

Etc.

I'm not so sure about that. How many of the services and products we consume today actually increase our quality of life instead of just giving a small dopamine boost that before you would've gotten from simpler things?

No billionaire made the world a better place.

Two problems with arguments like these.

First, "better" is so subjective that it almost becomes a moot point.

Second, a single counter example disproves it.

You don't think Ronaldo has entertained millions of kids around the world and made them very happy to watch him play? I would say that is a good thing.

Or LeBron, MJ, MacKenzie Scott...

Being really rich is awesome. There's never a downside to having more money. That's the whole point of money: the more the better.