When I spent an hour reading (and salivating on) the whole thread, the context I got was Nathan ribbing his friend Steven A. Shaw a.k.a. "Fat Guy" by highlighting a few instances where he did not appear to be the fearless founder of one of the best food/cooking communities on the web.
"Ferran Adria is going to ascend to the ultimate expression of the culinary arts: he's going to become a food blogger. Actually he's going to become more like Nathan M.: head of a kitchen lab and creator of dishes, without a restaurant."
Relatedly, Myhrvold did actually make a really genuinely huge contribution to cuisine with his gigantic ubercookbook Modernist Cuisine, and so it makes me sad that he turns out to be a bloodsucking asshole by trade.
He's done a lot of great things in software as well, but that doesn't change the fact that his stance on patents is wrong and economically destructive.
He may actually believe he's doing the world a great service, but surely you don't believe that just because someone is fantastically wealthy relative to the average person means they automatically stop doing things for the money?
At some point it becomes more like watching your Hacker News karma go up than it has to do with having a real impact in your life, but that doesn't mean the wealthy stop caring about it.
In other words... well, sure Myrhvold is wealthy... but he's not Helú, Gates or Buffet wealthy. He's just a chump compared to those guys.
Yes, he was billionaire-ish from Microsoft, and I imagine he does believe in what he's doing, so I guess he's not intentionally a bloodsucking asshole, but I don't know that that makes it that much better.
"Ferran Adria is going to ascend to the ultimate expression of the culinary arts: he's going to become a food blogger. Actually he's going to become more like Nathan M.: head of a kitchen lab and creator of dishes, without a restaurant."
-FatGuy