I have wondered the same thing many a time. I don’t think it’s naive to wonder honestly. I find it genuinely confusing, not from a moral judgy standpoint but more of an effort to reward standpoint.

If you or I sold tobacco in exchange for a quantity we’ll call a “shit-tonne” for the purposes of discussion. It would change our lives considerably. As you said, you personally would do it, and I think odds are pretty good I would too. But if that 1 shit-tonne of cash doesn’t significantly change the recipient’s life or capabilities or long term security, I don’t understand why they’d bother with it. I think my confusion diverges from yours in so far as I don’t think the point of getting rich for the vast majority of people has to do with acquiring the luxury of a moral compass. It might be for some, but I’d say for most it’s at best a side benefit and for many irrelevant. However I do think that most of us without the requisite shit-tonnes of cash like to imagine the purpose for acquiring it is to avoid having to expend the effort required to acquire anymore thereafter. In this framework, which seems so obvious and relatable to me, you’d think you couldn’t hook wealthy actors in to shilling tobacco because basically, they just couldn’t be bothered, I mean why bother? You might keep acting if you find it fun but surely there’d be funner gigs than ads?

This is a more cynical way to look at it, but no less inaccurate than your theory of acquiring wealth to buy the ability to be moral. In the case of wealthy actors however, I think they’re maybe not the best example, the richest ones are very rich but their material desires are sometimes able to scale with their wealth. Nicholas Cage was a good example as he managed to get himself in to ridiculous debt ostensibly from insane spending on ridiculous things. Presumably he liked having those things and was able with some effort to actually spend enough outpace his unbelievably high earnings. In that context you might well take lucrative acting gigs for scummy companies to help you out of debt or to help you buy one more private island.

There’s a whole other tier of offensive and obscene personal wealth where you see people like billionaire CEOs. These people trash my model of the ‘purpose’ of acquiring wealth and by the actions we see them do, yours as well. These guys probably couldn’t spend all their money on material objects if they actively tried. Their motives are very obscure to me. I definitely judge these guys but I leave them just a little bit of slack in so far as it seems generally observable that acquiring this much wealth seems to make you want to keep acquiring more wealth. I may not know why, but it almost seems like some kind of a fundamental law or drive so it could almost have some exculpatory power, though not much and in any case would only lend credence to the idea that society as a whole ought to avoid the accumulation of quite so much personao wealth since if my observation is at all accurate it would tend to mean, that much like we hold it to be true that all drivers will be impaired after a certain amount of alcohol so too does wealth tend to corrupt the decision making and motivations of people who have too much of it.

I’ve read about the topic a little bit and there’s some concepts that make some sense. People do crave purpose, so if you make enough money to sit on your ass and avoid having to make money people have a tendency to create objectives for themselves to work towards and if they don’t it can lead to unhappiness. In the case of some of those who achieved such wealth they had such objectives on the way up too, so it’s how they’ve always lived their life (theoretically, if they supposedly got their through hard work and merit, big if). This does explain it I guess, but as an explanation it feels vague and weak. I’ve heard ideas around a kind of competitive peer pressure effect too, these guys want to be richer than each other. This is unsatisfying because it’s just so dumb but makes a lot of sense, especially because it kind of scales with wealth as well. Often as people at all walks of life take stock of their position they will assess how well they’re doing in comparison to where they were before and also in comparison to someone else around them so by those metrics you’re always going to want to be doing just that little bit better than a few years ago and your always going to want to be exceeding or approaching the person you’ve most recently set as a desirable standard. All of these ideas seem to explain the behaviour we see but to me all feel too wishy washy to really make sense but I guess that’s because it’s going to be lots of these drives acting in concert along with something that one probably just has to experience and which basically none of us ever will as it comes with becoming richer than god.

Personally I can’t but think that if instead of becoming rich, I suddenly got bequeathed all of Elon Musk’s wealth unexpectedly from his timely death then I’d very likely have far less ambitious and contentious goals than he. Not necessarily because I hold myself to a higher standard but because, I mean, why take over the world like a megalomaniac when it’s so much easier and more fun to do lots of drugs and go traveling and play with all the best toys? If I really crave purpose I can make a movie or something, I wouldn’t even have to be good at it, I could buy everything related to it being made and distributed. If I was talentless and it stunk and flopped, it wouldn’t be my problem and I could afford to spend my time getting good at it as a hobby even if each flop cost hundreds of millions. But maybe one the zeros started trailing on my account balance I’d suddenly start wanting to own everything and influence politics and just generally being a bit of a prick, it seems to happen to people.