I often read articles like this, in spite of generally finding them quite tiresome.

in vox •  last year 

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https://www.vox.com/culture/23872485/elon-musk-walter-isaacson-biography-review

In part, I'm intrigued to see how these stories are ultimately reported - for example, in here, they make the case that Musk finds rules and regulations to be unnecessary/boring ex ante, and only accepts them if he believes they make sense. They say that this creates unsafe conditions for everyone working for him, and one of the examples they mentions how he opened Tesla plants during covid against public health officials' warnings. While Musk says they suffered no major outbreak, the article notes that 450 people got sick.

Curiously, they didn't mention over what time frame, or out of how many employees.

I was curious though. So I clicked the hyperlink. It took me to a hit piece / listicle of all the things some Vanity Faire reporter hates about Musk. I found the claim but again, no context. So I clicked through again and found that the time frame to get to 450 covid cases was probably well over a year (125 at roughly the 6 month mark from reopening) and I learned that this is out of 10,000 employees.

Meaning, 6 months after re-opening, 1.25% of his employees reported getting covid... And of course, there is no control for what percentage of people in the general population or even those whose jobs were still remote had gotten covid over the same time.

This seems to be the pattern I find whenever I dig a little deeper.

Reporters (often with an axe to grind) write the story in a way that sounds terrifying... But they don't bother to provide enough information for anyone to really make an accurate judgment. And so, in the end, we just have layers of self-reinforcing hit pieces.

As for Musk... I imagine working for him can be tough. He seems to be very demanding, and not particularly patient. But I don't know what else I'd really expect given who he is and what he's done with his life so far. He's an extreme outlier of a human being, and being such an anomaly probably makes it ironically hard for a lot of people to empathize with his mentality.

I'm pretty skeptical that articles like this, or even most biographies, are helping.

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