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As I understand Smith, he grounds morality in what he calls “sympathy”, which I think we would call “empathy”:

"As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. […] It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation …” (1/2)

He grapples with what it means that people’s empathy is so limited. As a result, “the great Director of nature” has arranged our natures such that “the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country” will, as if by an “invisible hand” lead to “benificent ends”.

But he was thinking more broadly than markets, and he (as far as I know) does not believe everything can be boiled down to a single abstract, interchangeable “utility” (or cash). (2/2)

I like this summary (from Ekelund and Hebert) that “in [Smith’s earlier /Theory of Moral Sentiments/] sympathy is the moral faculty that holds self-interest in check, whereas in [/The Wealth of Nations/], competition is the economic faculty that restrains self-interest."

The point is that self-interest needs to be restrained, but can be used as a tool, not that self-interest is in itself good. I hope he would see Trump and Musk as moral monsters, the product of a tool gone unconstrained.

…
Many poisons are useful drugs in small doses. That doesn’t make them *laudable*. And it certainly doesn’t mean that if some is good, more must be better.

The self-interest that produced Walnut Street Tea Company¹ is good, because moderated. The self-interest of the Trump and Musk and probably all billionaires has been compounded² into poison, not drug.

¹ https://www.walnutstreettea.com/

² I am unreasonably proud of using “compound” in both the sense of “compounding drugs” and “compound interest”.