Monetary profit should be our new moral code

Giving Objectivists the benefit of the strongest argument, what the author is saying is that Men Of Industry move humanity forward by virtue of their rapacity. Greed as a motivator causes them to bring together knowledge and production. By combining knowledge and production, humanity can in some wise advance to a "better" existence, and so this greed, while unseemly to parochial minds, is really a good thing.

At what expense, though?

Industrial greed was responsible for the Cuyahoga River repeatedly catching fire (!). It was responsible for GE dumping PCBs into the Hudson River, for Union Carbide in Bhopal, for the fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico, for Mercury poisoning of hatters, for locking seamstresses in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory while it burned, for Phossy jaw, for countless industrial deaths and disfigurements forcing the creation of OSHA, for the CIA overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Guatemala in 1952 at the behest of United Fruit, the dot-com and housing bubbles, and a litany of other industrial fiascos and most of the wars of the 20th Century.

This is what greed gets you. This is all in the pursuit of the production of stuff.

What it doesn't get you is the discovery or invention of stuff. Yes, industrialists have in the past provided large sums of money to fund R&D -- which goes to support people whose motivation is discovery and reputation, not money. Presumably most of us here have either been to or are currently enrolled at a legitimate college or university. How many professors or PhD students are motivated mostly or entirely by money? By the rapacious need to have more cash than someone else in the department?

Galileo and Darwin were in it for truth (and possibly fame).

So was Tesla.

Edison? He screwed Tesla out of promised money for improving Edison's (crappy) products.

The people who get the money aren't the people who discover the knowledge, or invent the device. So we shouldn't pretend like they are.