At least in OpenAI's case I think they take this thing very seriously (Sam Altman doesn't strike me as evil one bit, quite the opposite in fact https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEvbDq6BOVM). In fact most of the tech elites don't seem evil to me, if they only cared about money Zuckerberg and Gates wouldn't have pledged away all their wealth. Some of them are as you describe but I think most of them are actually somewhere in the progressive axis.