Tesla might have been more likely to focus on having the tech working at the expense of everything else.
If he did make it to an important investor meeting, he'd sit there massaging his naked dirty feet.
Like it or not - the business world requires some level of shallow ritual you have to buy into.
Otherwise you're optimizing for criteria other than "selecting whether to invest in Apple or Uber."
They arent single-mindedly optimizing to invest in the next apple or uber at all cost! They are balancing it against the need to screen out no-name bums that look and sound the same.
If you can win a coin flip 51% of the time instead of 50, you have a viable business model.
Perfection isnt the goal.
To build the company, Jobs adroitly tapped the network of support services that has made Silicon Valley such a fertile place for fledgling businesses. Says he: “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing, but we were very careful observers and learned quickly.” Jobs pestered Regis McKenna, the area’s premier public relations specialist, to take on Apple as a client. After refusing twice, McKenna finally agreed. For advice on how to raise money, Jobs consulted both McKenna and Nolan Bushnell, his former boss at Atari. They suggested that he call Don Valentine, an investor who frequently puts money into new firms. When Valentine came around to inspect the new computer, he found Jobs wearing cutoff jeans and sandals while sporting shoulder-length hair and a Ho Chi Minh beard. Valentine later asked McKenna: “Why did you send me this renegade from the human race?”
If nothing else, the stench would have blown them away. He didn't bathe for _years_.
Looks like he did exceed everyone's expectations.
OTOH people who prefer the conventional are not likely to recognize the most promising outliers for what they are, it can go right over their head as if there was no difference from those having below-average potential.