Once you have achieved significant status and money you no longer need to be fierce since people listen anyway. But most people worth listening to doesn't have significant status and money, instead we wait until they found their own companies and become rich before we listen to them.
This may be true for you, but not for me. I listen to many people who are not well known, and who are not rich, and who arae not startup founders. For instance, none of my friends are rich startup founders, neither is my partner, nor my therapist, nor my coworkers, yet I consider all their opinions valuable (more so than the rich "fierce nerds"). Most of the podcasts I listen to are not run by the rich and powerful, either.
It is true for society in aggregate, which is why big companies often loses to small startups on their own strong points. That should be basically impossible if the big companies were anywhere close to rational, but as we know such things happens all the time.
