He took pretty close to the Tim Ferris route of give a speech on soapbox in harvard square, then put "gave a speech at Harvard" on your resume.
His MIT class was of the type that is more like an ungraded bookclub than a normal MIT course.
What he did with the Tesla safety paper was far more ingratiating and conniving though.
The MIT directory lists him as a "Research Scientist"[0] and he has solid set of papers he's published on self-driving cars and AI[1]. This is completely consistent with the way he describes himself: "I'm an AI researcher working on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning at MIT and beyond"
[0] https://www.mit.edu/directory/?id=lexfridman&d=mit.edu [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wZH_N7cAAAAJ&hl=en...