Money and power to what end? The people who funded this had general goals about which they were and are totally clueless, and the designer and implementer of that plan said so. How conscious about each of the aspects of their policy preferences is open to debate and subject to conjecture, but that they're making money at them is not. As to how the plan worked over the intervening century, what its specific steps were, how they stitched together, why the designer was so certain about those purposes, and why its ends are so dysfunctional, the author is not correct, but then neither was he.
“Money and power to what end?”
Why do people compete with each other for money and power? To personally rule their world and be better than everyone around them if they can... For the elites it is competition to see who will rule the whole world and all of humanity. Each wants to own the whole Antfarm and all the ants in it just to say they do.
They are mentally ill and addicted to wealth and power. Even if what they do makes absolutely no sense at all, if it gains them either or both they will mindlessly do it whether it is logical and rational or not. They are truly “not in their right minds”. And they do not care how many they have to hurt to do it.
"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"O'Brien's monologue, 1984 (George Orwell).