My feeling is that he sort of lives for creating impressions like this so people treat him like, well Tony Stark basically. He gets off on that. And that is also why he is so obsessed by getting respect from the gamer, nerd, and geek communities. My best guess is that fuelled by this motivation he reads a lot on these topics and is intelligent enough to absorb the superficial level details. Superficial but nevertheless enough to impress people who don't know any technical details (journalists) and enough to impress engineers etc too because they are surprised to see that he knows anything at all on a technical topic of their expertise. I have had the same feelings before, if someone which I know is unrelated to my field comes and talks about some basic technical details of it, I get a mixture of surprised feelings and respect. But all it takes to get that information is actually just reading some wikipedia articles really.