There's some other compulsion driving them and it's not money. They have more money than they could ever want and need. Plus, they live in bubbles where they only interact with their own caste -- physical and epistemic.

I really think these techbros feel they are the personification of what Nietzsche called the ubermensch. They have this compulsion of creating -- like willing something that never existed into being. Again, because of bubbles, they really bought into the hype that they are the kind of singular genius that grasps the fulcrum of history. And they have to perform geniusness, like colonizing the solar system and such because that's what geniuses do.