Not sure why you had to add the (attempted) qualifier. He started a company and is selling a box. That makes him a merchant. How successful that venture is, is a different question, but he absolutely is a merchant in this arena.
A slight defense of any qualifiers, mine or others. I am a sole developer, who formed a "box" as you put it, to house my assets. I'm the sole director of it. That doesn't mean my box is at war with users. To be clear, a merchant is a middleman and some merchants have taken the goods produced by the builder and built a middleman moat. Cloudflare, Anthropic, and the list goes on. Geohot doesn't do this. He builds and sells what he builds. That makes him more a craftsman, not a merchant. Merchants market other's work and profit. Craftsman, or builders, build and grow their customer base organically.
I feel like you're splitting hairs. Geohot is/was selling shovels during a gold rush, full stop.
Maybe he had a recent change of heart, but his public actions (including Elon stuff) clearly put him in the "monetize hype" camp rather than the "quietly build" camp.