This is honestly not surprising, nothing he was doing required in depth knowledge of how they work.

Look at any cryptocurrency board (other than stack exchange) and the overwhelming majority of people bragging about how they have been involved in crypto "for X years" couldn't tell you the first thing about elliptical curve cryptography, the p2p protocol used by nodes, the PoW algorithm (beyond a basic understanding), what a non-mining node contributes to the network, or how wallets derive addresses from seed phrases.

Similarly you don't need to understand TCP to build a Shopify website

"$45B fund and I have no idea what I'm doing" would normally raise some questions about economic rationalism.