Pundits appear to be taking liberties with the truth and history. Again. David Mccullough's The Wright Brothers makes no mention of anything like this. In fact, their 'competitors' in Europe or Mr. Langley were much more well funded and/or independently wealthy people in need of a hobby with varying degrees of engineering competence.

The Wright family was solidly middle to maybe upper middle class. Lots of what both brothers and one sister could have spent on family expenses was available for this obsession due to them all being unmarried and childless for quite some time. (Wiki mentions other siblings, but Mccullough focuses just on Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine.)They lived very clean, sober, and intellectually rigorous lifestyles. They either rented or bought land in Kitty Hawk (it's been a few years since the book went back to the library) where government data indicated the wind and weather was most conducive to flight experiments. They bought the first successful plane's motor, custom made for lightness. It was a rudimentary thing with no spark plugs and could only run about 15 minutes before getting too hot though it was made out of a novel material called "aluminum." They obsessed about the quality of their building materials and generally built the plane from cloth and wood themselves. Much of the engineering involved in making a propeller move air efficiently was their own original mental labor; it is similar but not the same as all the state of the art fluid dynamics and published work that was directed at boat propellers.

Even when they were successful, their competitors, being among the pezzonovantes in high society, would not believe self-taught rubes in the middle of nowhere who hadn't even been to an Ivy League University or Oxford or Cambridge got the better of them. They certainly became well-to-do. In 1903 and the following decade, they had staff and could afford lawyers to fight everyone who stole their ideas, but "out-of-touch rich people" is something entirely different.