"What could be more important than a happy family and personal life? How on earth is this considered "hype"?"

Perhaps to you nothing is more important, fortunately people can do what they want - some choose family, some choose other responsibilities, most choose a balance. Whether Musk is happy or not he seems to have made his choice.

I don't know if you even read the post fully, but the post was about the hype of Elon Musk's personal life, not the hype of personal life. And yes for the most part, it is. The reality is he's a busy man, with a busy life, anyone who thinks that his family life is somehow supposed to be like that of a traditional "as seen in social studies" textbook either has their head up their you know what or is trying to mask a certain insecurity with a veneer of self-righteousness.

>What could be more important than a happy family and personal life? How on earth is this considered "hype"?

That may be all well and good for you, but first, you have a terribly ethnocentric and rather simplistic view of life as seen only from your perspective. Some people want to get enough and retire and frolic. Other people want to discover. Your ideal life may be sitting on the porch waiting for little Timmy to get back from school so you can build a go-kart; that's great, but that's not everyone's ideal life - and it doesn't in any way mean that little Timmy is any less important to anyone else. So if your thesis is that your vision of life is somehow better simply because it's the most traditional, you're going to need a more robust argument for that.

>I would trade any amount of billions for that, in fact I probably have, because I decided long ago that family and my personal happiness are more important than millions in the bank.

Also, you make the assumption that the man is somehow concerned about money. Whether you do that on purpose to further your point, or whether you didn't take full stock of the situation, I don't know. But the man is rich. And if he wasn't rich before, he's certainly "fuck you" rich now. He could be earning multiples on his money without even lifting a finger. It's not about money, it's about interest, and apparently, for him, about vision. My comment was about people self-righteously trying to compare the amount of time and the way they spend time with their families to someone who - regardless of how you feel about him, and I don't feel as hot as everyone else about him - is taking on two immensely difficult tasks. So when John Battelle, and everyone else self-righteously comment about not using email when spending time with their kids as if they were some martyrs of child-rearing, I'd have to say there's some insecurity involved.

So it's great that you wouldn't trade money over your children. That's great and I'm sure no well-adjusted person would. However, there are things in life that do not fit in to the inane work-life paradigm, and people expecting it to, either have very limited scopes of what life is and how one should live it, or they have their eyes glossed over by nicely packaged institutions of socialization. The truth is, a lot of people have very complex family lives. It's nice when you look at social studies textbooks and see two parents, one son, and one daughter, but life's never been like that and a happy family can't simplistically be reduced to "one that doesn't check email and text while spending time with each other - which, by the way, must be x amount of hours if you really want to be considered a close, happy family"