"Lick my boots, in person, and you can be one of the privileged few" is very much the behaviour of a Communist dictatorship, not a capitalist corporation.
I can spin up an Azure VM right now in almost any country I choose... except China. That's the only one where I have to beg the government for permission.
I know exactly how this works.
When someone has power, they will use it. In small, petty ways, or big “do me favours for access” ways.
It's both, and more besides. Veblen goods are absolutely a thing in capitalism.
Not that "giving people access to GPT 4 APIs because they attended a conference" should be controversial enough to even get worked up about, let alone to compare to a dictatorship, but Google did much the same at developer conferences: I/O 2012 swag list included a Galaxy Nexus, a Nexus 7, a Nexus Q, and a Chromebox.