Sometimes I imagine all the very wealthy people thinking about where to allocate their capital like "hm, hiring more people to do computational cancer research? nah. Let's try and invalidate people's insurance claims through their ad clicks instead."
Most corporations with any power are sociopathic institutions run by sociopaths competing with other similar corporations on who accumulate and deploy the most power. Punching down is always more lucrative than punching up and you don't change things or have breakthroughs without at least a little punching up. As you noted, that rarely happens because it's simply easier and more lucrative to fuck people over.
Sometimes I imagine all the very wealthy people thinking about where to allocate their capital like "hm, hiring more people to do computational cancer research? nah. Let's try and invalidate people's insurance claims through their ad clicks instead."