It's pretty unlikely. In one case there was a tech where I went to grad school, who performed so well that tptb decided she should be a professor. But before they could do that, they felt the pressure to give her a PhD (and where I went to grad school was very much on the "unconventional" end of the spectrum), so they enrolled her in the PhD program, made her take classes, and gave her a degree after she had finished enough classes to cya in the eyes of the accreditors, made her staple her papers together for a thesis, gave her a PhD, and then promoted her to professor.

Part of this was because consider if she decided to leave our institution... There are certainly places where she would have been denied a job opportunity on the grounds that she did not have a degree, e.g. state schools where there are often legally or administratively mandated minimum requirements for professorship and bureaucratic decision-makers who filter out non-conforming applicants before they are even considered.