I like a lot of Stephen Wolfram's work, but we must also recognize the questionable assumptions he made in many of his commercial projects.

There is a difference between cashing-in and selling-out... but often fame destroys peoples scientific working window by shifting focus to conventional mundane problems better left to an MBA.

I live in a country where guaranteed health care is part of the constitution. It was a controversial idea at one time, but proved lucrative in reducing costs.

Isaac Newton purchased the only known portrait of the man who accused him of plagiarism, and essentially erased the guy from history books. Newton also traded barbs with Robert Hooke of all people when he found time away from his alleged womanizing. Notably, this still happens in academia daily, as unproductive powerful people have lots of time to formalize and leverage grad student work with credible publishing platforms.

The hapless and unscrupulous have always existed, where the successful simply leverage both of their predictable behavior. =3

"The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod)

https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel...