Yeah, I think the OP is spot on; this is exactly the sort of thing that spurs i.e. Bill Gates. He basically won the omega-lottery, and then was like "okay, no

Yeah, I think the OP is spot on; this is exactly the sort of thing that spurs i.e. Bill Gates. He basically won the omega-lottery, and then was like "okay, now that I've rubbed the genie's lamp and have a bajillion dollars - what do I actually want to do with my life? Someone else can run the helm and keep the money machine churning, but is there a better purpose for me, personally?" I think in the case of microsoft, there was also an angle that, yeah, on some level microsoft itself had been a changing-the-world-for-the-better venture in and of itself, but Gates' own agency within that was no longer important, because the core part of it was already done. Sometimes the job of a "visionary CEO" is just to bring the horse to water; to riff on Netscape, for example, someone had to build the first mass-market web browser, and it was very technically hard, and had to be done well enough on the first go to dodge the nintendo virtual-boy trap, which meant that for a while, it had to be a really successful business. But once someone made a really well-made web browser, and accultured a large number of people that "a web browser and a a world-wide-web" are important things for humanity to have - after that, it was likely that the building of web browsers would become a self-sustaining reaction constantly pulling in really smart people, much better qualified than the original developers. At that point the original guys could choose to die at the chalkboard, but they can practically just sit back and watch, and sometimes even if you stay involved, its smart to take a backseat role and let the folks who will be your successors get used to the role (in fact, a lot of times, it's much better to focus on training them, and make sure lots of the intangibles you may have only done "incidentally" are also getting passed on).