The crazy guy wasn't crazy, just financially challenged & hoping the lion kingdom would attain a level of wealth that would eventually support the life he wanted.  You never know if a starving college student is going to be the next Bill Gates & keep you in mind.  

 The lion kingdom's career & wealth went nowhere for the next 25 years, but CG always pinged with another sure thing that would pay off after investing a few years of free labor & more importantly get him out of whatever situation he was in.  This was always followed by he's going to make a proposal & he knew a venture capitalist in exchange for just a few years of free labor.  2 years later, the cycle repeated.

 It never sounded like he did a lot.  He always said he was working on another project & then nothing would materialize.  Sure things & proposals would quickly evolve to skiing or links to politics.  The only 2 outputs lions can identify from those 25 years were a web page trying to sell the lion kingdom's software & his PhD.

 It sounded like he bounced around different corporate gigs for 10 years, never able to keep anything, then began a PhD in some kind of art or philosophy department in 2011.  For 10 years, he worked in academia in some role, towards that PhD.  He must have extended the scholarships & stipends as long as he could.  By 2019, he graduated & made it into some kind of teaching role in Hawaii.

 Lions imagined someday having enough wealth to put him up in a guest room, but imagined he wouldn't take the schedule or settling for the rigorous lion lifestyle. Lions are night owls & never goof off.  Another plan was to give him an inheritance like Howard Hughes.  The lion kingdom didn't plan on going broke & had no-one else to leave the leftovers to.

He once bragged about getting up at 4am, going running, being in perfect health.  Lions figured the private sector would wipe them out before his academic career wiped him out, so it was surprising one day for him to say his health was declining & he was checking out.  He was estimated to be only 59.

 It sounded like so many other sure things that never came to pass.  His last linkedin activity was 2 months ago.  The usual like on every lion video didn't come anymore.  The goog didn't show any obituary.  The lion kingdom would go on checking for signs of life like NASA checking for a Mars rover that was presumed dead, expecting him to pop up again.

The most likely cause would be an aggressive cancer.  That's the mane way animals become terminally ill in a short amount of time while still knowing they're going to die ahead of time.  The lion piano teacher bought it from throat cancer & a famous blogger bought it from very long term brain cancer.

If he really is gone, it means the world is again as it was in 1999 before he arrived.  No-one really knew the lion kingdom existed & lions manely worked in a vacuum.

Death is always around us after middle age.  It's another reminder that most men die alone.  No-one is there to write an obituary.  If you don't  win the bread, that's what's coming.  Men are the expendable soldiers in the social order.  The vision of being discovered as a corpse, sitting in an empty living room months after death gets bigger & bigger.

The multiverse says we don't experience death.  We just wake up in another universe & remember the last day as a bad dream or discover we never were on our way out.

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Anyways, Ashkenazi's schpeal about Russians learning music because they were interested at it rather than to make money reminded lions of what made the 80's fun.  A lot of animals did things in the 80's because it was interesting instead of focusing on the 1 sure thing that was bound to make money.  It hasn't been like that since.

It's especially palatable on the twitters & the gootubes.  They all do the same thing & nothing else.  Part of the reason is what makes money became accessible to all, rather than requiring corporations with billions of doll hairs.  When the 1 thing that could win the jackpot became something everyone could do in their bedrooms, they all started doing just that. Of course, making things work instead of selling companies was a different pressure.