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Maybe not a leadership position but I've worked on the engineering side of quant work and am familiar enough with fairly advanced Go / Chess players (e.g. national youth champions for age brackets for the US) to know that most of them could make enough to retire off one years salary during the boom years of algorithmic trading (~2003-2007ish).

I'm not sure how you define "deranged" (AFAIK, that's not a medically defined term within the DSM-IV) but most of those brilliant people end up being a little 'off'. My father was an academic, one of the people he went to graduate school with was working in Boston while I was a child. He was absolutely groundbreaking work but he's so difficult to collaborate with (think: the mannerisms of Richard Stallman) that he's been floating around universities until his welcome is worn out. He can figure out remarkable things in higher level computational chemistry, but he can't really figure out humans. Had he decided instead during the 80s to work at Renaissance instead of pursuing academic research, he almost certainly would be worth in the low hundreds of millions.



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