Honestly speaking, the story sounds somewhat believable to me.

They likely misidentified the leaker with that silly analysis and fired them on the spot, would be just the usual modus operandi of musk.

How likely is it that there would just happen to be a file with exactly the same wrong size in the printer logs?

I‘d say if the letter was short it‘s pretty likely.

Maybe there was few % error but no other candidate.

Which printers in that timeframe ever directly printed word files?

It would be the resulting spool file that gets measured, not the source Doc file.

they probably narrowed it down to one person and approached them with the logs and "admit and be fired or don't admit and legal (and all the bad/expensive stuff that comes with that) will be engaged to get to the bottom of it starting with you".

You can also easily narrow it down to a time period. Find out when leak occurred and then look at prints shortly before that.

Way to show your bias with shallow thinking.

EDIT: Read the link. Musk says he sent the letters with different spaces. The leaker would have printed a single letter. Since Musk has all letters, he need only match up printer logs with the sizes of the letters.

If it was converted to Word, then assume the leaker would use defaults. Why would they do anything otherwise?

This just shows that you didn't read the link and reacted based on your bias.

EDIT2: Keep those downvotes coming you biased people.

Two different leaks. One was a printed word file. One was a double-space-encoded email.

You could use bounds from x KB to y KB if you know the version of Word used and try to approach.

It is a difficult task, anyways.

I agree; this story is apocryphal. I was annoyed enough that I did some research into the story. Via this Atlantic article[1], I found the original Valleywag post[2] containing the letter from the employee. It's worth noting that the letter from the employee is pure text (i.e. not a scan of a letter), is only 170 words long, and has a couple of misspellings. The Valleywag post provides a paraphrasing of what the employee told them, followed by what seems to be the entire body of the email that they received.

The Musk detective work is described by Vance in a footnote:

“Musk would later discover the identity of this employee in an ingenious way. He copied the text of the letter into a Word document, checked the size of the file, sent it to a printer, and looked over the logs of printer activity to find one of the same size. He could then trace that back to the person who had printed the original file. The employee wrote a letter of apology and resigned.”

This leaves me a with more than a few questions:

1. Why would this email/letter have been printed out? It's short, informal, and did not seem to contain any corporate materials that would require access from a work computer. Surely, this would be better sent as an email from a personal computer? All I can think of is that the employee did print some kind of private company information (perhaps as proof?) to send to Valleywag. But wouldn't this mean that the print-job sizes wouldn't match since there would be printed materials not made public? It seems beyond insane to physically mail a tip to a gossip site that was built around emailed tips.

2. If this was sent as a physical letter, why would the quote in the article contain the typos? Why would they even take the time to type up the entire letter when the article summarizes every single point that the Tesla employee mentioned? Shouldn't they have taken some care to not verbatim reproduce text that could have gotten their source into trouble? I will say that the minimal journalistic standards employed by former Gawker-network sites provide convenient explanations to these questions, so these aren't particularly damning.

3. Is this really all the text that was sent to Valleywag? The quoted part of the letter provides no salutation or signature. Sending this text exactly as quoted as a physical letter seems bizarre, even for an anonymous tip.

4. Would the sizes of the files sent to the printer even match up considering the document metadata? This actually seems somewhat plausible.

5. Would the print-job really be the best way to figure out who the leaker was? In October 2008, before the letter was written, Tesla only had 363 employees[3] and may have laid off a few dozen of them before this letter was written. This employee claims to have joined in 2004. A Wired article from 2006[4] mentions a meeting of 30 Tesla employees and board members in December 2004. It seems like there are a very small number of people who could have been the potentially leaker. How many of those people were using the corporate printers the day after the mentioned all-hands meeting to print a single page document?

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I imagine that this story was told to present Musk as smarter than everyone else while also threatening disloyalty, which seems to be a frequent Musk bugbear. The bit about the caught employee writing a letter of apology and then resigning (amidst large-scale layoffs at Tesla in 2008!) also seems a little too cute, in a chain-email-atheist-professor-humiliated-by-freshman-Albert-Einstein kind of way.

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[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/elon-...

[2] https://www.gawker.com/5071621/tesla-motors-has-9-million-in...

[3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-oct-25-fi-tesla...

[4] https://www.wired.com/2006/08/tesla-3/

The wired.com link doesn't work me ("Sorry, something has gone wrong"). Archived copy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221116003941/https://www.wired...

The size of the saved word file (depending on exactly how it was saved and what version) will vary depending on how it was edited, and yeah, what metadata is there, so this seems...wrong.