Agree with you. It's a 100% part of his strategy to get earned media and now maybe he's addicted to it.
I would wager that the risk to his earned media strategy is he is going a bit off the rails in the last 6 months and staff might not be as interested working for him in the future. I don't think it has scared off investors yet as it appears he has the midas touch in the business world.
Oh stop it! I lived in Los Angeles, that place is too big and populated by too many sharks. You only become famous if you really, really want to and deploy resources in a way that is optimized to reach that goal.
Musk wanted to be famous ever since the Paypal days.
There's a reason why you don't hear media obsessively reporting on 3 time Oscar winners Daniel Day Lewis and Jack Nicholson anymore. They have concluded their respective press tours (Lewis at least temporarily and Nicholson for a good 10 years, ever since he made "The Departed")
You need to seek press to get press, you don't stumble into it.