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There is something of a tradition of the inventor who creates something so useful that he can set up a company to sell it, and the profits from that are enough to finance his hobby of inventing, his tinkering about with fun stuff, for the rest of his life. The best-known example I can think of at the moment is Wolfram, whose Mathematica software is so popular that it pays for him to be able to spend the rest of his time doing maths essentially as he pleases: it finances not just his time, but the computational power, the jetting about giving talks to universities and industry, and everything else that goes with it.

There are so many examples in fiction, particularly sf, that I am forced to conclude that this property defines a sort of modern-day folk hero, an aspiration for engineering types. The canonical example from fiction is Tom Swift, a boy inventor whose research is financed by his father, who is a successful inventor and engineer, and by patent fees from his own inventions.

Perhaps my favourite fictional example is Bruno de Towaji, from Will McCarthy's ‘The Collapsium’. In backstory, de Towaji invents, essentially, the telegraph in space: a fast communication system that enables the colonisation of the solar system. This makes him the richest man in the known universe, so rich that even his loose change is more than the riches of the remaining megarich put together. But his use for this money is not to flaunt it or buy power. Instead, he buys a small planetoid and moves there to become a hermit. On his way out he commissions, at fabulous expense, the creation of a large number of miniature black holes, which he uses for his real passion, which is to create a gravitational lens so strong he will be able to see the end of the universe.

Of course, this aspiration isn't limited to engineering fields. There is an obvious counterpart in artists (which includes musicians, writers, film directors, &c.) whose early work is successful enough to secure them the financial backing and audience to do pretty much what they like later on. Similar is the risk-loving banker whose established investments provide the stability to anchor their continued gambling with ridiculous sums of money.

This kind of “my early work finances my research” position is a desirable one for people who really enjoy their work, which is quite common in certain sections of creative professions like engineering, writing, and computer science. It means you have the tools and raw materials necessary to do work on a scale that hobbyists can't even imagine, with an extra measure of independence that you don't get from working for someone else, and the freedom to make mistakes that you don't get if you have to live by your work. It is this last that distinguishes the successful (for want of a better word) entrepreneur from the retired person who takes up photography, framing, or cabinet-making, and finds he can easily commercialise his hobby just enough to pay for the raw materials. And it is the freedom to make mistakes, to throw things away if they go wrong, that makes the creative process really start working, to a completely different level of creativity from what you get in a business environment, even in a company of one person.

And it is the independence and freedom that makes characters like this so useful to authors of fiction. If you want a hero who doesn't have to take orders, has a mysteriously inexhaustible supply of gizmos and implausibly well-equipped private laboratories, can spend all his time on the plot rather than having to go to work seven or eight hours a day, but doesn't spend fortunes on extravagance or have huge retinues of servants to prevent your readers identifying with him, then you need a wealthy inventor.

Once they are in fiction, there is one particular factor that makes such characters good rôle models, in aspirational terms, for creatives. The self-made man who, having found wealth, uses it to keep doing what he was doing before, still living a simple life but now with more facilities to carry out his invention, makes a powerful reassurance against the fear of wealth changing one. I forget which one, but one of the early Batman films shows Bruce Wayne trying to court the leading lady. He invites her to dinner in his mansion, but they sit at opposite ends of a ridiculously long dinner table, almost afraid to speak because the room is so large and empty. Eventually they dismiss Alfred and have dinner around the kitchen table instead. The sequence is clearly getting at the isolating power of wealth, perhaps an odd message for Hollywood to be sending out, but one that finds resonance in the ‘be careful what you wish for’ part of the mind. Going back further, Dickens writes often of self-made men whose success makes them boorish and dull. Tales of people whose wealth improves them, gives them the ability to carry out exciting adventures without taking away their character, act as a useful counterbalance, reminding audiences that success doesn't always exact such a heavy toll.

Even for people who are still trying to get there, their commercial work finances their personal interests. Most open-source projects, for example, are financed by programmers' day jobs; the issue of ownership of ideas that employees invent on their own time comes up quite frequently, so I can only assume that the garage and basement inventors are funded in the same way. These are the same people we started with, who will go on tinkering in their basements even after reaching the top of their profession and winning financial security and independence.

Companies where one arm of the company subsidises the losses of another arm (except in the obvious cases like research departments and infrastructure) tend not to last very long before they de-merge, leaving the loss-making arm to the financial wolves. Perhaps there is a parallel for personal life, that we should try to make sure all aspects of life are financially sustainable. It seems to me that the true aim of people who want wealth is not the money itself but the magic ability that capital gives you to jump out of the realm of saving and spending, into a state where your money looks after itself.

And, just to prove this does apply to artists, not just to engineers: it is said that Don McLean was once asked by an interviewer, “Don, [American Pie] has been a best-seller for years and is now studied in university courses, so what does it really mean?” His answer was the title of this article.