It is definitely the latter.

Remember Madeline Albright saying in the 90s that starving millions of Iraqi children to death was worth it?

Remember Nixon and Kissinger just laughing amidst racist slurs while discussing the genocide in East Timor?

Obscenely wealthy and/or powerful people are essentially, definitionally, obscenely classist, racist, psycopathic and sociopathic.

Every once in a while, a few finally realize how evil theyve been through their careers full of world altering decisions. McNamara was barely able to admit the entire Gulf of Tonkin incident was nearly totally made up before he died. He was not really able to express human emotions about his invention and then professing of this falsehood to pursue what ultimately was thousands of Americans and millions of South East Asians... dead. With no real strategic advantage gained in the long run.

By the time you get into the actual upper rung of Western Capitalist society, you already know through personal experience that basically all the rhetoric about "any one can succeed if you work hard!" is total bullshit, as they nearly all came from wealthy, priveleged families, with advantaged positions in terms of starting wealth, access to healthcare, access to technology, access to education and more importantly, far, far more opportunities for nepotism.

We have literally known for over a decade, via scientific studies, that the social dynamics of any decently large corporation/empirically/ reward ruthless sociopaths with promotions to higher paying, more powerful positions.

I am not religious, but it truly is the case that the love of money warps people into monsters, capable of gaslighting the world, capable of seemingly inhuman levels of hypocrisy.

Again though, this should not be that surprising. We know the ruling class tend to be psyco and sociopathic, and we know that such people basically do not have morality: it is all a zero sum game of winners and losers to them, and goddamnit, they will be the winners no matter what they have to do, or who they have to hurt.

It gets even worse when you realize that some of the 'conspiracy theory bullshit' is actually true.

George Herbert Walker Bush's father Prescott opened and ran a Bank during the lead up to WW2 which was used to funnel money from many uh fascist/eugenics-curious American Business Tycoons directly into funding the nascent Nazi Party, until it was shut down by the FBI.

I could go on, but you may get the idea: There absolutely /are/ a relatively small number of families that are just outright evil through know history. Of course, it is far more complex than 'evil secret societies secretly write history', partially because some of these wealthy and powerful families have blood feuds with other ones, but mostly because Capitalism rewards newcomers that are exceptionally ruthless all the time.