zlacker

I don't think Elon is motivated purely by money. If he were, a lot of his actions don't make any sense, like tanking his own public image repeatedly by doing silly childish things.

It's more likely that he genuinely believes that he's building the future of human civilization, and he wants himself in charge of that so that he can shape it how he sees fit.

You're right that our socioeconomic system unfortunately doesn't have any guardrails for that kind of behavior. Arguably that's a bug (or yet another symptom of the architecture being fundamentally flawed).