Eh, because one’s time is valuable/expensive and most people would love to have more time doing what they love.
It’s cool that he doesn’t want to monetize it, but I would absolutely understand if he did. You don’t have a hit like that often and it could free him up for years (life?) to build more stuff he’s interested in without answering to anyone.
A lot of (most?) already super rich people monetize everything they can to the max. So I don't believe it's out of a desire to simply quit working. I think it's more about making money for the sake of making money, also known as greed.
A lot of them do, but don’t underestimate the number of people who are role-playing as being more wealthy than they are.
I’m not talking about people with successful business exits or those who have been in high-paying careers for a few decades who have a side business. It’s the people pleading with you to pay $10/month for their side Substack or trying to charge for mediocre podcasts and such. One of the oldest tricks in the content marketing book is to pretend to be very wealthy and then charge others for access to your knowledge.
For a lot of people it's not even just simple greed but more an easy way to measure them against other people. They are often very ambitious types who take great pride in being "type A personalities" and things like that.
It’s cool that he doesn’t want to monetize it, but I would absolutely understand if he did. You don’t have a hit like that often and it could free him up for years (life?) to build more stuff he’s interested in without answering to anyone.