> Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery.

To be fair a lot of startup origin stories are so ridiculously fake that they seem like they could have only been created as a mockery of earnestness. Like the founders know they're lying, they know everyone else knows they're lying, and they're just doing it anyway as a weird flex or whatever.

Say what you will about Bezos, but at least he was honest that he just put every CPG product into a spreadsheet and discovered that books had by far the best unit economics and flywheel potential, rather than making up some bullshit backstory story about childhood literacy or whatever.