The fundamental reason that giving away tokens without proof-of-burn makes it impossible for that token to compete with Bitcoin:
And realize that the whales' can kill the fork because they already own tokens in both forks from the inception.
And that is what makes it different from launching an altcoin.
The whales of Bitcoin get free tokens to dump on your coin so they can buy Bitcoins.
However in Byteball's case looks like Tony could have made deals with the exchanges to kickback some of the tokens to him in exchange for his scheme. It certainly could be a scam, as @cryptohunter alleged. Who knows? Where there is honey, there are usually flies.