I'm aware of what you're saying about Buffett (he is essentially an excellent and influential business magnate, not just an excellent investor), but it doesn't apply to Simons. He's a mathematician (Chern-Simons theorem), and his investing methodology is utterly different from Buffett's.

Simons' firm, Renaissance Technologies, doesn't do value investing. They were one of the first hedge funds to do quantitative financial modeling. I suspect a lot of what they do is market making instead of purely directional trading, but it's hard to know since the fund is incredibly secretive. Simons' business connections or acumen in the traditional sense have nothing to do with the fund's success; it's entirely about the strategy they employ.