This article does its subject something of a disservice in the fourth paragraph: "His fortune comes not from some flash of entrepreneurial brilliance or dogged devotion to career, but from a lifetime of prudent do-it-yourself buy-and-hold investing."
We learn later in the story that Wertheim did in fact demonstrate enterpreneurial brilliance and dogged devotion to his career and was an unimaginably successful buy-and-hold investor. The company he founded, BPI, threw off up to $10M / year in cash that funded his investment portfolio.
That he he was successful not just as an investor, but also as an inventor and entrepreneur, is what's truly amazing.
Notably, from that site: "Vitess has been serving all YouTube database traffic since 2011, and has now been adopted by many enterprises for their production needs."
"But there’s still one thing that continues to nag me after all these years -
how the hell did Dave track me down 3,000 miles away from home after midnight
on that hot summer’s eve in Bristol, Connecticut?"
Assuming the author flew cross-country from California and his brother had a phone number in the family name, it doesn't seem too hard to piece together with good old fasioned detective work - on top of good old fashioned databases open to the NSA. I wonder if Dave got it right on the first call?
This works surprisingly well for a class of unsophisticated attackers. nginx, among others, will happily spoon-feed very large numbers of concurrent clients at 1 byte / second.
"The year was 1986 ... ended up settling on Las Vegas's MGM Grand."
This immediately made me think this story is made up: the MGM Grand as described and pictured opened in 1993. As noted in the comments, the actual year is more likely 1988 and the casino likely Bally's.