The Behind The Bastards podcast had a sequence of episodes looking at the idea of The Illuminati (from Weishaupt, through anti-Masonic panics, Discordianism, and the idea’s inglorious most recent resting place, Qanon), and their summary of Weishaupt’s organisation was that it was a grift: an organisation whose ostensible purpose was to provide an endless ladder of “esoteric knowledge” the idle rich would pay to climb, with its actual “inner teachings” being the advancement of controversial ideas like secularism and human rights, which many of the marks climbing the ladder would have doubtlessly found objectionable, so they were palmed off with recycled alchemy/kabbalah and secret codes.