Coming from academia myself, I'd have to say you've been deceived on both counts, there. At an institutional level academic research is all about the money, and the prestige used to bring in more grant money and student-loan money. For instance, I know a professor at a top-tier US university who received an award last year purely for being in the select group who had made the school $1M by bringing in large government research grants. And the people who do this do very well financially.
There are many individual academics for whom it's not about the money, but this institutional culture corrodes altruistic motives, and selects against them.
There's a difference between money for the university and money for yourself. I think the poster was trying to point out that taking an academic job is not the path to riches.
For example, I made more at around five years in to working at Microsoft than I will as a professor unless I manage to make full professor at a top university _and_ run my own lab. Undergraduate starting salaries in this field, from top-tier institutions, are still far above assistant faculty salaries, despite ~8 years less education (a post-doctoral stint is basically mandatory to even get a faculty position interview at this point).
So, even if I made the very top tier of my field and stayed there until senility sets in, it's questionable whether I could ever make up for the lost wages during my re-education. And that's assuming I had never gotten another raise beyond inflation, ever.
At least in CS, you don't go into academia for the money.
I think it's terrific that you're making choices based on what really interests you, rather than optimizing your income. You're obviously the kind of person pclark was talking about, and that's admirable.
I do think, though, that if the institution's executive goals are more along the lines of "make money" while an individual's are more "do cool stuff to change the world," he or she is setting himself up for an enduring conflict which can be hard to negotiate, or even to keep track of at times, because the institution will have so much influence over their life.
I do think this is a big problem (bigger than it was a few decades ago), but I think on average it's still not mostly about the money for most scientists. People don't go into physics because they want to get rich, but mainly because they want to research physics. At least, they shouldn't, because if your main goal is making money, the physics-professor route is far from the optimal one.
I agree that incentives are increasingly selecting for empire-builders, though, which is money-related. There are some people who really want to manage a big, important physics lab, and are more ambivalent about the physics itself, and those people are nowadays being selected for.
There are many individual academics for whom it's not about the money, but this institutional culture corrodes altruistic motives, and selects against them.