Without that he wouldn't have gotten nearly anywhere close to where he ended up.
Because for a lot of his ventures he used that image to collect way more money then the company would normally had gotten and the used the additional money to try to beat the completion enough so that the investors won't complain even through the company didn't reach to promised (and often outright absurd) goal anywhere close in time/at all.
But in reality his ventures collect way more money than companies of those types normally get because he hit home runs in the early internet era, then started tackling some incredibly ambitious hardware engineering problems and built companies that actually started to solve them, complete with an exciting thesis about them being all being linked to Mars colonies. That's where the "Tony Stark" reputation comes from and why people bothered following him on Twitter in the first place.
Sure, some retail investors follow him on Twitter and end up buying his stocks (or some random crypto thing he has no financial connection with but thinks is funny...) because they think he's great, but if the difference actually owning the platform makes to his ability to raise capital isn't absolute zero, it's closer to zero than $44B. And not necessarily positive, because owning Twitter doesn't make batteries cheaper or ease the technical and regulatory challenges of self driving or LEO mesh networks, but it would take up a lot of his time and resources.
Fun fact about Howard Hughes, he once crashed a biplane during the filming of a movie he was directing. (One of four airplane crashes he experienced)
The stunt pilots had all refused to try the maneuver he wanted to do, so he hopped into the plane, took off, and did exactly what they anticipated.
It's not clear whether he was pulled from the wreckage or found in a nearby hangar after walking away from it, but he survived and finished the movie, which made a loss despite being the top-grossing film of 1930.
Celebrities, eh?
Still helps Musk.
Trying to buy Twitter is just a symptom.
I think it's simple.. he is insanely egotistical. He thinks he is some super genius. I'm not saying he's not a smart guy, but he was able to benefit from the early dot-com era mostly because of timing- he happen to be a smart guy at the right age of tech when it was much "easier". There are millions of people who are really smart and work in tech but it's not like they can just magically make an insane amount of money like early on.
He thinks because he is the richest person in the world that he has also worked the most and is the smartest. Both are extremely far from reality- but you can't convince someone of him like that.
Anyway- my point is he loves being able to just post a tweet and have however many people read it and talk about it. Similar to someone like Trump- they just love all the attention to an insane amount, and unfortunately technology makes that possible these days.
Absolutely yes