He is, pretty much, a parasite hiding behind a ton of hype and useless fluff, like snowflake pictures.

First he made tons of money as a patent troll.

To hide his dirty business he fascinated journalists with a machine he created to kill mosquitoes with lasers to fight malaria and yellow fever. No journalist bothered to realize that malaria infested places rarely have electricity to run that machine.

Then he wrote a U$ 600 book (Modernist Cuisine) on how to make over-pretensious risottos and steaks using over-expensive equipment and chemistry. No serious cook follows any recipe in that book anymore.

Now his next trick to show off is snowflake pictures.

Yep, the man surely has both the know-how and the money to put up an irrelevant and pretentious show-off.