If you read the full story, you'll see that many investigators were perplexed by his motivations and the sheer scale of his enterprises. His underlings described their duties as being like something from a James Bond movie. It was all so much larger than life, and erratic. So why did he do it? Not for money, which he didn't seem to care about. If you think about it as playing for rewards as in a video game, it makes a lot more sense. https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind