I'd say, you are looking at this from the angle of a nerd. For you Elon or Sam are not (primarily) nerds because you know nerdier nerds (what you called very high-profile nerds). But for the general public Elon and Sam are very much the definition of a nerd. They have never heard of any of the high-profile nerds you know.

And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.