That's because this essay doesn't exist in isolation, it's a defense against the (entirely accurate) claim that his interest in Lisp for its own sake hasn't cha

That's because this essay doesn't exist in isolation, it's a defense against the (entirely accurate) claim that his interest in Lisp for its own sake hasn't changed the world, only his business skills have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400184 If you don't have that context, then the essay is in fact very confusing: the beginning of it says that caring about money is the wrong motivation, and the end of it says how good it is that you now get money from earnestly working on things. What it's actually doing is trying to convince people that there's a connection between his financial success and his earnest work on Lisp, and more generally that successful startups (who apparently still need VC investment) tend to be successful because they deserve it, not because they happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right access to capital.