Both. If you take 900 reasonably skilled people and direct them towards nonsense for a few years, that is definite value lost to society. It sounds like $1 billion in actual cash was lost this way. And the buildings they were in could have housed useful activity, the computers they bought could have done useful things, etc.

Those people could have been doing useful things. And it sounds like their activities were worse than nonsense, they actually destroyed money they were given.