I respect Google, Facebook, and Twitter because of their ability to connect people and their genuine intellectual contributions to fields like information retrieval and AI, and sure, their moonshots. But I think its arrogant to say whether someone adds value to society because its an extremely complicated philosophical question (judging the guy playing the game saying he's wasting his time). I'm not sure its fair to characterize all hedge funds as simply trying to squeeze out alpha though either, there are many prominent activist investors who've pushed for greater corporate governance and transparency, in cases like MBIA, Lehman, Herbalife most recently, etc. And if you wanted to consider Google's moonshots, it should be only fair to consider the billions most of the hedge fund managers have given away in a dick-measuring contest to various charities and research initiatives. But I understand your argument and agree that a lot of financialization provides no benefit to anyone.