Common excuse for this kind of behavior is "evil people will do it regardless, so the only option for us is do it too to be prepared for when evil people use it for evil purposes".

Pitch them to Elon Musk instead. That's all he seems to care about.

Just thinking aloud: I've been in this industry for what will be going on 20 years now (startup/tech/venture funded stuff) - my observation is that things have become incredibly abstract over the past 15 years - people are very abstracted away from what they are really doing...in that, the capital is increasingly abstracted far far away from capital providers, capital allocators are increasingly abstracted away from the outcomes of the capital they allocate, and capital deployers are increasingly abstracted away from society at large. I do occasionally still run into people who I think "this is a fully formed sensible thoughtful responsible human" - but it's incredibly few and far between - I think the reason is primarily how decoupled everything in the system has become from it's upstream and downstream effects. The other consequence of this is that the competitive nature of market dynamics shift, things become hyper competitive because the unknowns become deeper. The inevitable geometry of large, scaled systems.