"Money does not change people, it reveals them" - Henry Ford. I'll have to remember that quote.

All the points you make are valid. Nevertheless, when someone like jerry has 15k followers on Steemit, it's not that easy to answer everyone's comment. You can see by the amount of comments he gets on his posts. I'm not trying to defend him here, this is a general result of being popular. If we look at celebrities for example, the same applies; a rising star has the time to read and reply to the little fan mail they get, but once they reach a higher level of celebrity, there's no more time to read the exponentially growing fan mail.