Probably netted him enough to set the rest in motion. Still, landing professorships at MIT and Harvard without a college degree is pretty wild.

and/or a lottery ticket

and/or employment from multiple sources and picking stocks

and/or a particularly lucrative real estate holding

and/or it probably wasn't linear at all just like your wealth probably doesn't materialize linearly either

so doesn't that make this whole discussion rather odd and clickbaity? I saw similar articles regarding Epstein and thought "thats not how any of this works?"

if I was ever put under similar analysis nobody would know anything accurate, they would just google me and see a big crowdsale I was on the executive team of and saw that it collected several million dollars and assume "thats how I made my money" even though they have zero transparency on who was paid what and how, or how the organizations made its revenues or not, or the investing patterns and homeruns and leveraged losses I had - which resulted in a useful exemption from capital gains tax on my next homerun, and would have zero information about what partnerships I'm part of, what hedge funds I'm invested in, how any of those things perform, etc.