This might be a more intelligent discussion if you focus on the substance of the answer instead of the behavior of the participants. I admit that I was, technically, "making up" the answer, in that I did not have direct confirmation. It is rather like, if you asked me what the color of the sky is on a cloudless day in Barcelona, I'll "make up" the answer, having never been to Barcelona. But I know how skies work, and I know there's only one possible answer. And, as it turned out from the link you provided, I gave the
correct answer.
If you dig into the answer in the link you provided, Simons says gained his initial funding (as well as his data) by what we could accurately call gambling. He had no strategy, no reason to believe he was successful, and no expectation of being successful. He was - through luck - successful. With that success, and having gained money he could then afford to lose, he noticed some structure in the data, and hired some mathematicians to evaluate his hypotheses. It was in fact more likely that he would have lost all his gambled money before even thinking about approaching the problem technically.
He was lucky, in the most straightforward sense. Anyone else, too, could be lucky. But the nature of probability is that the common case is not the lucky case. That's not a digression, that's the exact discussion at hand. If you want to insist that occasionally people are lucky -- sure, and occasionally a newcomer will invent a secure block cipher.
If you have enough money to test hypotheses, and you're okay with losing that money if your hypotheses are wrong, fantastic, go test them. That's exactly what Simons did. If you want to get rich by investing in the stock market without a strategy and hoping to get lucky, well, yes, some people get lucky. Simons happened to be one of them. But that's hardly evidence you should emulate that part of his behavior.