Yup. Make money first. Once you have stable income, you can use the excess to effect as much change as you want.
You also lose perspective, because all the skills you've gained to make money are really only applicable to making money, and by that point your social community will only be people making lots of money and then the only problems you'll be solving are the ones for people with resources. The best minds in the world are focused on figuring out how to make people click ads and make money in the stock market.
Sure there's outliers, and the most famous are the ones of people who have "won".
Not trying to sound snarky but I'm really trying to think of an example but can't find one.
Donations are nice, but it's not obvious to me that Carnegie was a net positive (or Gates or Musk, for that matter).