How the accumulation of wealth works statistically is that when transacting with less wealthy players, you have a lot more to win and a lot less to loose, while the other player has everything to loose and—relative to you—hardly anything to win. Over time this results in gradual accumulation of wealth.

I see the accumulation of social capital no differently. This particular transaction might not have benefited him, he might even had lost some from it. But over time, other transactions more then made up for that mistake, and this one became irrelevant, which really is to his benefit.

All publicity is good publicity when you're in the game of monopolizing the world's attention market, c.f. the constant publicity stunts of figures like Trump and Kanye.