If someone you hate gives you $1 million though, and says "I'll pay you again next year if you do well for me, you might even get more" then you're going to find that if you take the money in a few years all your decisions are centred around the happiness of the person you once hated.

If you keep taking their money you're morally complicit in their actions too.

> all your decisions are centred around the happiness of the person you once hated

You’re essentially talking about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect. (The government sets a bounty on snakes? Bounty hunters realize that the cheapest way to get snakes to turn in to the government, is by breeding them themselves. Now you’ve got more live snakes, not fewer.) When greed or need-for-money is an incentive (such as in a for-profit corporation), you’ll be driven to do whatever perpetuates the income stream; and, if someone is paying you to do something, it’s cheaper to just do that thing because you get to continue working with them in the future (so your marketing costs for finding new work are zero.)

But, importantly, the Cobra effect doesn’t apply if your goal (as a person, or as an organization) isn’t to make money, but rather to use up money (i.e. to bankrupt your ‘patron.’) If you’re not a bounty hunter, but simply someone who hates snakes, you won’t ever bother to breed them. You’re not in it for the money. You’re in it for there being fewer cobras.

There are, of course, organizations which are not for-profit corporations. Mozilla itself is a non-profit, despite there also existing a Mozilla Corporation.

As well, even with a for-profit corporation, the income of such an organization can be completely divorced from how it deals with an arbitrary stream of money. Banks, for example, despite being for-profit corporations, do not spend the money you deposit with them. Your money is not an asset on their balance sheet; in fact, it’s a liability.

Mozilla Corporation could, for example, just donate all the money it receives from unsavoury sources over to Mozilla-the-nonprofit, and keep none for itself. This would remove its profit motive vis. this income source.

Analogies:

Police confiscate stuff from criminals, and then sell that stuff at auction. They aren’t driven to confiscate as much stuff as possible, because they don’t directly see the proceeds from those auctions (it goes into the city budget, which does eventually fund them back, but in some inscrutable, non-motivating way.) Instead, the police department usually just has a mandate to take the stuff and sell it. (There is a broken incentive around police confiscation of drugs and cash, because these are so hard to trace that police can and do directly profit from these confiscations. But money wired between corporations as a result of an invoice is not untraceable like cash, so the confiscation of cash isn’t really analogous. A closer analogy is the confiscation of pimped-out cars—the police do not, and cannot, make personal use of these. So they don’t really care how many they find.)

Oil-and-gas engineers aren’t driven to flare as much natural gas out of oil fields as possible, because there’s no useful purpose to flaring natural gas (for now); they’re just trying to use it up and get it out of the way of the stuff they do want.

Building renovation contractors aren’t driven to collect as much asbestos as possible. They only collect and remove it because they can’t certify the building until it’s all gone. (Imagine an alternative world where you could turn in asbestos to the government for a reward. We’d get a Cobra effect so fast.)

In all these cases, you’re not driven by your need to collect the thing; and there’s no element of greed driving you to collect the thing; it’s just part of your job to collect the thing. As you diminish the number of illegal weapons out there, or amount of natural gas in the oil field, or the amount of asbestos left in buildings... you can simply do less sequestering. Nobody is put out when criminals run out of guns, not even the police. The oil-and-gas engineers who did the burn-offs are done their work at that oil field, sure, but they just move on to another oil field. The renovators have plenty of other jobs to do, and the people who specifically handle asbestos removal will just retrain to remove the next thing people want gone from buildings, toxic mould or what-have-you.

——

What we’re essentially talking about, here, is a ‘parasitic’ nonprofit—the organizational equivalent of a mosquito, something that wanders around sucking its ‘hosts’ dry, but which doesn’t expect (or attempt) to subsist indefinitely on a single ‘host’. It expects to either kill its host; be killed by its host; or be “swatted away” by its host, at which point it can find a new host.

And, because a parasitic organization serves no useful purpose to its host—it offers no attempt at symbiosis—the host will eventually become aware of its nature, though how fast this happens can vary dramatically, depending on how bureaucratic the host is, and the time-scale of the deal the host and parasite originally made. (Imagine how long it would take the US government to figure out that a weapons subcontractor is a foreign-government led operation with the aim of “siphoning money out of the US defense budget while avoiding actually satisfying the demand for a given weapon”, purely through the regular business-side interactions between the government and the contractor, without the assistance of the government’s background-checking process. Unlike governments, private companies do not generally do background checks on their contractors’ employees, so an IBM, or a GE, is not safe from this attack.)

Of course, unlike in the animal realm where every animal at some point deals with a parasite from a state of complete ignorance, parasitic organizations can get reputations that precede them everywhere. This is what I’d call the host “killing” the parasite nonprofit.

But, well, the same people can form as many organizations as they want... and perhaps even use successive organizational vehicles to drain the same host companies repeatedly, if they just ensure to put a different face (different figurehead CEOs, etc.) on the parasite each time.

These are the same proven strategies that “fake” charities use every day to line their own pockets! Just turned to a purpose other than selfishness.