My feeling is that he sort of lives for creating impressions like this, so people treat him as if he is, 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. So fuelled by this motivation, he reads a lot on technical 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 really takes to get that information is just reading some wikipedia articles.