Looking at twitter these days I sure have a feeling this is not super unlikely.

What are the odds that he calculated a certain number of bytes, and exactly one other employee had sent a file to the printer that contained that number, but it was just a coincidence? If the method indeed doesn't work (as you suggest "is possible") it's impossible it would turn up a false positive, only a false negative.

almost as good as the odds that he got something pretty close, then changed the details a bit to fit the narrative.

or, he stayed up for two days until he got it exactly to match by tweaking his approach a little at a time, and actually matched it to the right person. Honestly, he seems like he'd do this.

Sounds like a fun project any hacker would get distracted by.

You wouldn't do that though, would you? You'd type the thing up, print it, see that the printer received a 4.7 KB (or whatever) doc and look for a 4-6 KB doc the week of the leak, and then you have 100 documents to go through, rather than 100000.

It's also possible that he calculated the number of bytes, searched the logs, didn't find anything and then tweaked his numbers until something matched. And then fired that random person to make a statement and lied about how he found out who to fire.

I didn't mean to claim other than that anything is possible. I was just saying the original theory put forward wasn't internally logical.

This approach would work in isolation, but by failing to find the true leaker would result in them being empowered to leak more over time. Is there evidence that Tesla has a lot of regular leaks?

I would assume there was also at least a minor degree of due diligence, such as "Would this person actually have had the knowledge to write letter".

It'd be even easier than that. Walk to the person's desk and ask them to bring up the document that they printed on ${printer} at ${time}. If he can't produce a document of the correct size, he's your guy.

This is a good way to fire innocent employees who had the audacity to edit a document after they’ve printed it.

Or lying. When you are rich or famous people or in vogue socially let you get away with these stories e.g. Consider feynmans "I'm modest but look at my genius"-isms

Yeah exactly. My thought was he probably found the leaker in a much more mundane way, but being undeniably great at PR he decided to spice up the story with this little bit of detective work. It sounds so clever you want to believe it, even if it's pretty impractical(not impossible though!). You know what they say, don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.

More important is spreading the perception he was able to sleuth down who the leaker was, to deter future leakers.