I've never really been able to identify with this sort of "make money and then fix the world" stuff because I feel that everyone hugely simplifies every issue and looks only at first or maybe second order effects.

You fix malaria/give to the poor/raise the minimum wage/etc. Cool, now we have a wealthier population with more people doing more stuff to modify the environment. We accelerate biosphere collapse and global warming. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

I think that if you're being truly logical about these things you could just as easily come up with a grand solution that's something like drawing a graph of social connections from you, go out a few layers, and then press the button to delete everyone else on the planet and rewild most of it. Or go back in time and don't discover oil (or was the suffering of the pre-industrial era worse? maybe it was, probably it was...!).

I don't think I'd be chosen to go to Elysium but I can't really see the logical flaw in the argument either. Why should the super rich care about the rest? Move forward a few years/decades; why should superintelligent AI care about humans? We don't care about mosquitoes.

Making a company that makes a prettier table or a faster car or whatever feels like it's directly solving a problem. Making a company that aims to "improve the world" just seems like a fool's errand to me, second law of thermo, that sort of thing.

Big waffle.