I'm mostly playing devils' advocate here, as newspapers, lawyers and shortsellers usually have their own axe to grind and are continually searching for good David against Goliath stories.

Just dropping in that having a toxic effect on the company and being respected / appreciated by peers are absolutely not mutually exclusive. Often times they rather go hand in hand and you've got such people rallying up others over non-issues (in the big picture of things). As others already said in the comments, cohesion and alignment are far more important to a high risk / high growth company than "solving all the problems".