For all I know, maybe he actually is the world-class genius he believes himself to be, but it's difficult to tell underneath all the blatant self-promotion.
After Quake was released and the principals of Id Software broke up, John Romero pretty much spent the next few years making an ass of himself during the development of Daikatana. When asked about the delayed and beleaguered development process on Slashdot, John Carmack kind of paid him a backhanded comment saying something like "A properly disciplined Romero is a credit to any team." And that's more or less what Wolfram is: properly disciplined, he would be an asset to any cutting-edge physics research team, but as he his he'd rather go down these rabbit holes than suffer to work with people of more ordinary intellect. And it's his, and the world's, loss really.