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I mostly agree, but I don't necessarily consider these two in tension with one another. Consider the archetypal charming psycho-/socio-path in fiction, who could maintain friendships and relationships if he wanted to, but doesn't see any value in doing so, and yet is unquestionably adept at charming and manipulating people in the short-term (e.g. con artists, cads, politicians with shit-eating grins).
I suppose this hinges on the question of what "charisma" means. To take a stab at it, I'd say it means the ability to make people like you, feel at ease around you, trust you — and especially the ability to do this in a very short timeframe. When considered as a goal-oriented skill, it's the ability to get people to do things for you because they find you prestigious rather than dominant. I see no reason why a person couldn't be good at this (even exceptionally good at it) and also have no use for friends, approaching every interpersonal relationship as a mark to be exploited.
I think we're talking past each other on the definition of friend, my friend. You seem to be using it to mean a true mutual understanding between two people, while I'm using it to mean more along the lines of "people who like you."
The con artist may have no real friends, in the sense that he doesn't actually like or value these people around him. But many people are under the impression that they are friends with him, that's how he conned them. Bernie Madoff conned his friends, so you may say he wasn't friends with them, but they trusted him and allowed themselves to be conned because they thought of him as a friend. The cad may not love his conquests, but they are all under the impression that he does. Politicians function by getting people to believe they care, even when they don't, and getting people to throw themselves under every passing bus requires that those people like you.
Someone with charisma may be a sociopath (though I hate that tired and fake archetype) who approaches every interaction as one of exploitation, but that's only his interior life, from the outside you won't know that really. From the outside, in terms of visible or measurable outcomes, you'll see someone with a lot of friends and admirers, tons of people willing to do him favors. While you might be able to construct a hypothetical toy example where it behooves the charming sociopath to have no friends, I don't really think it's a common case, in nearly every situation it is better to have people like you than to have people dislike you. Life is nearly always easier when people like you, and your brilliant sociopath is basically never going to calculate otherwise.
So when someone has genuine charisma, from the outside you're going to see someone with a lot of friends. Even if on the inside he disdains them, from the outside that's what you'll see, and if you don't see it no charisma exists.
The opposite case is rare enough that it strikes me as another cope, in which people who lack charisma pretend that they have stealth-charisma, and despite the fact that everyone hates them it is all really a clever manipulation game they are playing.
Yeah, that's fair enough. If no one likes you (even if it's not reciprocated), you have no business calling yourself charismatic.
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