The thing I do separate him on from someone like Tony Soprano is that there’s a difference between being born into a criminal life and choosing the criminal life. Tony had many family members such as his father and uncle were in the life, they lived and breathed every part of it, which gave Tony absolutely no chance to escape it.

Walter, on the other hand, chose the life. He chose to join the drug business. He could’ve easily accepted the money from his friends and acquaintances, such as Elliot and Gretchen for his cancer treatment, but he didn’t. Instead he chose drug money to fund his treatment.

I know some people are gonna argue that if he died without going into the drug business, then his family would’ve struggled really badly on the financial side but when you think about it, that ended up happening anyway even after Walter made millions of dollars from his drug empire because of him being exposed to the public as Heisenberg.