By that logic, we should celebrate Madoff for sacrificing other people's money. I don't think it's unreasonable for society to set limits on the scams and cons businesses are allowed to be based on.
So from what I can see you can't say one is a scam and the other isn't. Both are a gamble and the one succeeded until now while the other hasn't. A scam is, when they didn't even try to do anything. Or when they used the money to buy yachts instead of financing space base science. Is there something like this? If they sold a pipe dream and worked hard to try to make it become reality, imho, it's not enough to call it a scam.