You should watch his "live CEO'ing" videos for Mathematica. They're pretty good. He'll be personally testing something out for an upcoming release, something will break and he'll call up whoever was in charge of that function or module and start asking a bunch of questions.

I very much doubt that Stephen Wolfram is bored.

Has he done any foundational science either ?

Yes.

Why is this downvoted? I agree: Yes. His Wiki page[1] says:

    > Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18 and nine other papers. Wolfram's work with Geoffrey C. Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used in experimental particle physics.

And:

    > In 1983, Wolfram left for the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton.

As I understand, IAS is all about fundamental physics research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram

hmm, I think the entire FIRE movement is basically about this, no? Some people want to just do gardening or whatever, but if your hobby is science, that's totally fine too. Not every kind of science can be done on the cheap, but basically any theoretical work can be.