Re: He should have become an IT consultant...
"he ran IT businesses in the late '90s and 2000s" ...
"I get to make a genuine difference to people's lives - a small number to be sure, but it's something that IT never allowed me to do,"
Clearly he wasn't a very good businessman, as obviously his IT businesses were abject failures. My interpretation is that someone who "ran IT businesses" wasn't just a contractor running a one man business, but someone who actually employeed people.