That is not accurate at all. These people can and did do lots of research in academia and had plenty of data. They obviously get paid a lot more in industry, however.
Sources? I've seen first hand the limits of the 'data' we had at school. Papers constantly citing in their experiments: "the largest real world graphs we are aware of are on the order of 1B vertices" (a twitter graph, from something like 2011. The other highly cited one is the live-journal graph).
There's a massive dearth of data in academia. This is also why you see people like Kleinberg working directly with facebook on network research.
There's a massive dearth of data in academia. This is also why you see people like Kleinberg working directly with facebook on network research.