At the end of the day he's a billionaire because he had a viral hit and was ready with a monetization strategy (and had amazingly cheap running costs).
None of this really speaks to his business or technical acumen, and he hasn't exactly done very much lately.
This is not the case of a guy getting lucky in the viral lottery and then running his mouth.
A game that's so dependent on mods for long term appeal and server management shouldn't have to rely on decompiling the .jar and patching classes by hand.
Full disclosure: A year of dealing with a small-population server regularly getting OOM-killed on a 512MB VPS might have made me slightly bitter.
Since January 2013 they've spent almost the whole time on optimizing the performance.
And the only features they've implemented since where features people wanted really badly or features which came automatically – for example, after adding support for translucent objects they were able to add stained glass with just some few lines of code.
He has proven the exact opposite. He made a clone of an existing game, failed to deliver on almost everything he promised the people buying it, and then walked away from it leaving it to be never finished by someone else.
>This is not the case of a guy getting lucky in the viral lottery and then running his mouth.
Yes, that is exactly what it is.
I also noted that you did not mentioned which game he supposedly cloned. I noted that because when people say these things (whether minecraft or flappy bird or 2048) and I checked the other game, it usually turned out they provide very different experience.
[1] http://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecr...
Notch isn't even close to being a billionaire; he's a multimillionaire.