Is it just me or isn't this a case of a rich guy building his own cult? It either became too expensive or more likely he became bored with it and shut it down.
Eh I don't he really believed in it enough for it to be a cult. It's sorta like that, I guess, but a bit half-hearted or at least three-quarter-hearted for a cult. It sounds like it was a cult for some people (the ones telling that story to their kids every night, for instance).
Cults are fun, there's obviously a lot of demand for them among the atheists / logical workers of SF who have to live with so much boring truth all the time (e.g. the guy who says "I feel like much of my life is so focused on Doing The Thing that I don't take that kind of time very often. The feeling of warmth and excitement and sparkling eyes was really strong, and it formed a lot of my sense of what this group was and why it was meaningful.").
