It's his life. I can certainly look at many other lives and say they are lot of more wasted than his. Heck, he already created Mathematica, if he wanted to go and lay on the beach for the rest of this life, it would still be a lot less wasted than what many other people have accomplished in related domains.

Yeah, I don't like his arrogance, it's very grating to read. And perhaps nothing revolutionary is going to end up as a result of all the play with cellular automata but it's still interesting. Not as a rule, but sometimes discoveries in history are made by wild and wacky directions of research.