From reading about the history of LISP I'm not sure I agree. My take on it is that It was never meant to become a real language as it is now, some guy hacked together an interpreter for the s-expressions because it looked fun and easy, no-one ever bothered to take it further, and here we are.
LISP seems to be the bare mininum required to do whatever McCarthy was starting to explore and these days a lot of LISP nuts seem to think it is the coolest thing ever because of its minimalism without realising it was never meant to be that way.
Yeah, you can express anything in lists. You can also express any program in a turning machine. Doesn't mean you should.
But I don't know LISP well enough to say whether people who are commercially successful with LISP owe it to the language, or they would have been whatever language they use.