I don’t remember ever reading anything uniformly complimentary about Musk. But then, I guess I wasn’t reading glossy business magazines.
As for 100 years ago, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller got lots of bad press. Teddy Roosevelt railed against the malefactors of great wealth, although when the economy crashed, he had little choice but to ask Morgan — one of the few real economics experts back then — for help.
Andrew Carnegie got good press by giving away almost his whole fortune, but before that, when he was a union-buster, not so much.
It wasn’t so easy to know Theratos was a fake. They got FDA approval for a test in July 2015, which was a few months after the first questioning press reports. At first it seemed like the advantages of doing blood tests with lesser quantities of blood were exaggerated, but it was hard to believe that nothing significant had been invented.