You're surprised that people are trying to capture a bag that could possibly lead to multigenerational wealth in the tune of tens to 100s of millions?
For all the hubris and arrogance of the tech scene, and especially the Bay Area's, founders at least pretended to pursue a greater calling than money by leaving cushy gigs to pursue a new venture they were passionate about. Sure, that only lasted a handful of years before it became a gold rush to move to the Bay for YC and pursue the startup-to-acquisition pipeline, but they at least pretended to care.
The naked pursuit of wealth at the cost of potentially tearing apart society is mildly alarming because the scale it's happening at is so big.
In my opinion there is no "slipping mask", merely a changing of the guard that always happens when massive piles of generational wealth are at stake.
SV has always operated on exploitation of their workers, they just hid it well from the public.
Perhaps you've seen under their mask, and you know they're scamming the investors. After the NFT bubble it's a plausible hypothesis. But I don't know what it means to say that the mask just isn't there and it's naked pursuit of wealth.