He obviously did it as a gimmick! He goes by his previous name in real life still. You have to understand that this is something he did during the height of the dotcom bubble when "dot com" was as much of a buzzword in the media as Bitcoin is today.
I don't see how having a little fun equals to mental illness, but I'm pretty sure you were just joking anyway.

He changed his name to .Com ;P that should tell you enough about how serious he is about domains. He has also written a book that he is going to publish on the subject. His software expertise will help immensly with our business and he has been working on a appraisal tool (has a lot of other useful functions too) that already blows all our competitors out of the water for years.

So anyway: back to topic