I don’t know about that. He often said that the best way to get rich was to start a religion. Then he did it and got rich. Doesn’t sound all that crazy to me, unless it was crazy like a fox.
I don’t think being shrewd and crazy are mutually exclusive.
I’ll just link to Wikipedia’s account of his life, but whether he was drinking his own Kool-Aid or was playing a long-con, the man was clearly batshit.
I think it was a compounding of these things. He started the religion in order to get rich (some alleged witnesses have apparently claimed) then he was forced to expand it to keep it viable. New Era Dianetics for Operating Thetans has some pretty weird stuff in it that will make you skin crawl and other stuff that will just make you go “sheesh”, and the church does everything they can to suppress access to this material to outsiders (a religion with “trade secrets”? come on). It appears that Hubbard became so wedded to Scientology that he could not possibly walk away if he wanted to, and the whole business dragged him into the nut pit. He may not have been batshit by nature, but his life’s work made him that way.
Certainly a sociopath.