I never thought about it before but that's exactly what corporations are meant to be: "personhood"s that think only in economic terms. People get lazy and they run out of greed once they become millionaires and they want abstract things like love or popularity.
But they still don't turn into homo economicus. If they lose all care for love and popularity they might just as well find other outlets for irrationality, like bravado, hubris and generally taking things too personal (worst trading strategy ever).
I think of it as cancer. Society = body. Humans in society = cells. Some cells are small, some are big. But some cells, for whatever reasons decide to take far more resources than they need to fulfill their function. These are the cancer cells. They have a runaway feedback loop that will never stop on it's own.
