Could Stephen Wolfram Have Become a Successful Entrepreneur at a Young Age?

[Stingray]

Edit: The question I'd like to ask him is if he had the choice to do it all over again, would he want to follow the same course? My concern with child prodigies isn't that they aren't able to excel in one area, but that they may lack the experience and wisdom to make good choices about what they really want to do with their lives and get pigeon-holed into something that they may be good at, but isn't necessarily the thing they enjoy most or would choose if not pushed into it by their parents at a young age.

While not quite as young as Wolfram, I'm someone else who went through grad school much earlier than most people. I would definitely do it again. My parents were not pushing me. They were actually trying to slow me down most of the time.

 

[f95toli]

The question I'd like to ask him is if he had the choice to do it all over again, would he want to follow the same course? My concern with child prodigies isn't that they aren't able to excel in one area, but that they may lack the experience and wisdom to make good choices about what they really want to do with their lives and get pigeon-holed into something that they may be good at, but isn't necessarily the thing they enjoy most or would choose if not pushed into it by their parents at a young age.

I had a lecturer who actually knew Wolfram back when he was still working in academia (the lecturer in question works on complex system, so presumably this was when Wolfram was still interested in cellular automata) and Wolfram is/was according to him not exactly a "normal" guy; very, very difficult to work with for a variety of reasons. He is apparently VERY confident in his own abilities.
That said, the fact that he done so well as an entrepreneur means that he must be able to work reasonably well with other people when he wants to, so either this is something he learned later OR it is something he knew all along how to do but just can't be bothered when interacting with "unimportant" people.