Status games are a continual process of escalation and co-option. They're somewhat like military buildout in this sense.

One common pattern is that if there's a way of genuinely signaling low status within a culture, often some people whose status is generally understood to be way higher than that will adopt the forms of that signal. Thus you get political leaders claiming to be public servants, wealthy people wearing denim pants with pre-torn holes in the knee, and similar things.

That can get confusing if I focus on just the signal, and assume it's the same behavior motivated the same way in both cases.

I generally assume that this is meant, whether conscious-intentionally or not, as a way of increasing the contrast and making their actual status more salient. Roughly: "See? I'm so powerful that I don't have to talk myself up, or display symbols of my status. I can give all of that away because I have abundance."

(There are, of course, similar behavioral patterns around tangible stuff as well as symbolic stuff.)