Whether that’s true or not the way he’s so quickly and casually dismissed people like that, that have made relevant contributions to his work is a red flag for me.
P.s. normally Conway’s work wouldn’t overlap centrally with a theory of everything but it’s more relevant given Wolfram’s approach.
A plausible explanation for his being viewed as megalomaniac is a disapproval of a perceived lack of humbleness ("A good scientist ought to downplay their discoveries, make them seem like no big deal. He claims his discoveries are super important, so he's a baaaad guy").
Having been in your (supposed) position of coming across discussions about Wolfram, where the first things I read where judgments about Wolfram the person instead of his ideas, I arrived at the following conclusion after a while:
I don't know and don't have the expertise to evaluate the correctness or value of his ideas to physics or science in general. I'm also not interested in "drama", I just want to learn cool stuff. So what I can do is actually read his work, keep an open mind with respect to his writing style, and see what, if anything, I get out of it.
The result of that is that I occasionally read a blog post by him, or a random paragraph from NKS (which is available online), or watch one of his Q&A streams. [2] And from those, I get tremendous value. The ideas are often beautiful, clearly explained and visualized, and some have had a large impact of my thinking about both the universe and the mind.
Not reading someone's work because of other peoples' judgment of that person just robs you of potential opportunities to learn something.
[1] https://people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_0201.html
[2] https://www.twitch.tv/stephen_wolfram/videos?filter=archives...
"An interferring CEO who thinks he knows everything and any project can completed by one engineer in 2 weeks, maybe 3 if it's really complicated
[...]
If you do have to work with Stephen Wolfram, may god help you. 30 years ago, he was a genius with ideas ahead of his time and he managed to productize them. Today, he is still a genius with ideas that would have been ahead of their time 20 years ago. He is failing to lead this company to the future, and his main method of leading is screaming like a toddler who is told they can't go to the beach during a hurricane.
If you are in upper management or project management, you will have to meet with him multiple times per week. In these meetings he will ask for updates on features and products he invented a week ago and be angry they are not ready to be pushed to production yet. After he finishes loudly complaining about how slow and bad everyone is, then he'll go on to request entirely new things that he expects to get immediately. Priorities are never clear, and when you try to get him to guide you, he he has no idea what he actually wants other than "everything".
His irrationality and personal attacks drive people to tears."
Maybe I am overly harsh, but to me, it sounds like Steve Jobs minus being actually at the frontier of innovation.
Wolfram just sounds like a very intelligent but childish and insensitive leader with bursts of anger because reality doesn't follow his way.
Unless you are going to work for him, it is largely irrelevant whether he's a megalomaniac or not. He's a person that has produced very interesting and useful work (e.g., mathematica). You can take the good things about him and forget about his pompous/annoying stuff.
Edit: Downvoters, got evidence? Here's Gorard's papers [0] [1], and Wolfram is clearly taking credit for this work upon which only Gorard's name appears. Gorard doesn't do themselves any favors, by name-dropping Wolfram constantly. Almost as if Wolfram employs Gorard and pressures them heavily to incorporate the name-dropping...
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14810
[1] https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/wolframphysics/Documents/so...