Musk's raising of capital - and hiring of staff - depends pretty much entirely on people who're at least one of 'comfortable with extremely high risk' and 'thin

Musk's raising of capital - and hiring of staff - depends pretty much entirely on people who're at least one of 'comfortable with extremely high risk' and 'think the goals are really really cool'. So in his specific case leaning in to his public persona is probably a net win. How much of it is deliberate versus him just actually being that much of a lunatic is of course very debatable, and my opinion is mostly "no idea, but I hope we get cool spaceships out of it anyway".