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He invoked a past prosperity, but his actual plans are to make a fortune by swindling the rest of us.

Jim Simons, a math prodigy who gave up an academic career to make a fortune with the world’s first quantitative investing firm, died last week at the age of 86 at his home in New York City after a battle with lung cancer.

“All the air is getting sucked out of the room by these for-profit companies who say, ‘Wow, this stuff is awesome, if I could patent it I’d make a fortune.’”

The publisher was founded by Alexander Grosset, a shy Scotsman who teamed up with George Dunlap, a gregarious Pennsylvania transplant, to raise $1,000 in order to establish a hardcover reprint house that would make a fortune peddling the likes of Rudyard Kipling and Zane Grey before taking aim at the burgeoning children’s literature marketplace.

In retrospect it was a perfect pitch for cryptocurrency speculators who wanted to believe that they, too, could make a fortune without any traditional financial background or connections.