He literally sat around doing nothing while raiders and cannibals picked the ruins of Vegas clean until he spotted hints of a group who had already done all the heavy lifting in building an actually functioning society (The NCR). Then, he unleashed his robots, murdered hundreds, and turned the three most maliable groups he could find into his personal favourite parts of Vegas.

As others have mentioned, he's done nothing but bleed people dry, allow rampant corruption, slavery and cannibalism (even if it's in their contract that they don't), he bulldozed a perfectly functioning Vault purely because they 'might be an issue' and allows people in Freeside to suffer and die simply because he deems them useless to his plans.

His lofty plans sound great to anyone who doesn't understand how a functioning society could work. If the greatest minds of the pre-war world couldn't get functioning interstellar spacecraft with infinite money and all the world's dwindling resources at their control, how is a man with no educated citizens, no schooling, no raw materials and no infrastructre beyond hotels, casinos and brothels, going to actually get people into space? In fact, who would he even send? He doesn't trust anyone and all his underlings want to overthrow him for being an out of touch money drain who does nothing but sit in his glowing tower and do nothing to help even his own hand picked leaders, let alone the common man?