Answer: yes, sure. It's far more honorable to want to be wealthy than, for example, to vie for social status or power over other people. I want to be wealthy; I wish everyone were.

I feel like I'm an old (28) knight, having learned the hard way that people are not honorable. For the record, I've seen more disgusting behavior in supposedly "world-changing" startups than many people see in their lives, and far more than I saw in finance, which is supposed to be unethical and full of greed but (quite honestly) doesn't look very different from anywhere else. The most ethical of the 5 companies where I've worked was in finance.

First, it's not about what you want, it's about what you do. There's nothing wrong with wanting to have money. You should want to have money if you're smart. Why? Because money is a vote and the World's First Problem is that most decisions aren't being made my smart or competent people. So get out there, do great work, and see if you can make a mark. You're only doing wrong if you start making moral compromises to get money or influence. If you turn unethical, then you become part of the more severe World's Second Problem, which is that the few genuinely smart people in positions of power and influence are generally unethical.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to have financial freedom and autonomy. If you don't have these things, chances are that your life will amount to very little. That's not the same thing as wanting to be a billionaire, though. If your net worth is $3 billion and you're trying to get to $6B to show up that other guy, then your motives are probably not good.

Social climbers I find pretty revolting, but the desire to do good work and be well paid for it is, I've come to realize, honorable.

Now, bad people do slimy things for all kinds of reasons, and often those reasons have little to do with material gain. Sometimes it's status or vengeance, and sometimes it's just a desire "to see what happens". Malevolent curiosity is a powerful motivator having nothing to do with money or measurable personal benefit. Again, it's not peoples' motivations that make them bad or good. It's what they actually do.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I encountered far more sleaze in VC-funded startups than in finance, and I think I figured it out. False poverty. Now, I'd he hard-pressed to call a startup CEO making $150,000 per year "poor", but a lot of these people feel poor, given that a 27-year-old venture capitalist with no accomplishments to his name is making twice that, just because his daddy got him into Harvard Business School. When people get a sense that they "should" be doing so much better (being VCs instead of being founders with their hands out) they feel poor, they feel desperate, and they act desperate.

Finance has its share of slime, for sure, but the false poverty is less prevalent. Bankers know they aren't poor and that they're not allowed to act that way.

This might also explain why the politics and in-fighting in low-paying but "glamorous" industries like fashion and UES nonprofitistan are so much worse. Because these people are paid poorly, they have a sense of living on a precipice and will do anything to avoid falling off. Although this is also a false poverty (because most of these people could change industries and do OK) it has the same effect.

The conclusion of all this should be the obvious one. Greed isn't good, but hunger is worse.