Let's be less cynical. Nothing to do with borrowing reputation.

The original authors have something. They don't have the expertise in condensed matter physics to really know what. They don't know how to report results and what results would be conclusive. Their work is simply not convincing, and if they were experts they would also not be convinced.

That's why they brought in another collaborator who is an expert. But because the paper was released early it's clearly a mess. You can see the big quality improvement though just between the two drafts.

It's not cynism. The disagreement about authorship apparently was motivated by someone in the original team being pushed aside to open a slot for the well connected "10k citations" guy. It's a old problem academia still fails to address. See:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-colonial_science

No one knows if this version of events is true

Indeed. But if further investigation reveals the situation to be what it appears to be, this would follow a long list of similar occurrences, the likes of César Lattes and Jocelyn Bell.

> Nothing to do with borrowing reputation.

It's a pretty common practice across science.