There’s a book to be written about how/why retired general officers repeatedly get lured by snake oil and big bucks. (And some like Alexander do the luring.) Naivete? Entitlement? Will to power? Conspiratorial cluelessness?

Finally, FINALLY their true genius is being recognized, and they’re getting compensated as they shoulda been all along!!

Goes back to Ulysses Grant.

Maybe he's just the corrupt product of a system with corrupt incentives.

Maybe spending their entire work lives in an organization with tons of checks and good faith actors so they can mostly trust the information being fed to them. Suddenly moving into a world with none of those institutional guardrails and getting pitched by people who feed their egos. +$$