>who got the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, left his VP role at DeepMind to have no reports, and be an IC

That seems like an obvious choice to make. Managing people, looking at Gantt charts, meeting with compliance & legal and all the other organizational work of management is tedious, boring and miserable. But it pays well and signals high-status, so people do it.

If you've won the Nobel Prize, you don't need any other signal of high-status and he's surely making plenty of money at Anthropic. Of course he'd choose to spend his time doing interesting work for lots of money instead of boring work.