Can abuse break a genius? This question is motivated by the movie Whiplash which justifies the abusive behavior of a teacher by the future success of the student. The idea is that if a student fails to become fanatically driven to the degree that (s)he ignores/survives/enjoys teacher's abuse, then (s)he is no potential genius and his/her departure from the field is no loss to the field and Humanity.

Science is, of course, very different from music (which is the subject of the movie), e.g., they have very different Lorenz curves. I.e., a Ph.D. in Physics at the 50th percentile in his class can still have a decent professional life. In Music, he will probably drop out of the field (like the drummer who switched to medicine in the movie).

Still, I wonder what influence abusive professors (e.g., Landau) could have on science. We will never know, of course, of any potential Einsteins who left the field because they were mistreated by their thesis advisors, but we might be able to find circumstantial evidence.

Statistical evidence: are there any studies correlating students' success with teachers' personality at the high end of the spectrum? (I.e., very talented graduate students, very famous professors, success is measured in Nobel Prizes or something similar).

Anecdotal evidence: are there any examples of students leaving their advisors because of abuse and still achieving great success in science?

PS. Please note that the important point here is the high end of the spectrum (i.e., not elementary school, and not even college). The critical aspect of the question is that the teacher can claim that he is the senior colleague of the student, and that their common interest is advancing the field rather than educating the student.
Because of the way our systems work, at the top end of the distribution in fame, you will find people who are not only very good, but who also strongly desire to be famous and are very skilled self-promoters.  The market is simply too large for people to rise to the very top without that being the case.  And that means they are more likely to be abusers as well.

Sufficient abuse, academic or otherwise, can destroy any person.

Abuse can also help the abuser, by allowing them to effectively exploit other people... and that in turn might help those who survive (or who also learn to profit from the strategies of abuse), because they have a famous supervisor.

So: abuse can be profitable to the abusers and their chosen disciples, but it's a bad deal for the rest of the human beings they interact with and should be resisted at every turn.