Every group has these people. Whether it's churchgoers, world leaders, tech CEOs, high schoolers, beer league softball, or even chimpanzees. Social bullshitters who do most things for the image among a small group of peers. It's a good skill to recognize this kind of pattern and how so many kinds of patterns are the same things repeating themselves in a different environment.
They've been slathered with money, PR and attention for years before even making a single penny in profit. At some point that creates a sense of cognitive dissonance that's hard to shake.