The collection seemed designed to provide a thoughtful argument for supporting innovators like Musk despite their well-documented flaws. That’s a good story idea, and there’s a way to execute it well, through original reporting, with carefully argued explanations, from rightfully skeptical authors—the same rigorous requirements for coverage of any public figure. The Popular Mechanics essay collection is not that.

“Some of the criticisms have merit,” the introduction of the collection said, but the essays that followed mentioned none. Instead of trying to confront and reckon with Musk’s erratic behavior in good faith, the essay collection downplays it. The infamous Tesla tweet that prompted a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission, cost Musk and Tesla $20 million each, and pushed Musk out of his role as the company’s board chairman is chalked up to Musk being “clumsy in his tweeting at times.”

The collection portrays criticism of this and similar actions by Musk as trivial compared to his accomplishments in the spaceflight and automotive industries, of which there are certainly many. “Zoom out, people,” one author writes. “We’re talking about a guy who thinks on a cosmic scale, who wants to push civilization as far as he can while we still have one. But go ahead and scoff at what he said on the quarterly conference call.”

Read: Elon Musk and the meaning of “off the record”

It even goes so far as to tabulate Musk’s contributions to society and that of his critics and concludes that Musk wins out, which, in their opinion, invalidates those critics’ concerns. “What have these stock analysts and pontificators done for humanity?” the introduction asks, as though contributions to humanity must be weighed up before criticism can be considered.

The editor in chief of Popular Mechanics says that this—a positive piece that argues Musk’s innovation overshadows his mishaps—was the whole point.

“The collection of these little pieces of writing is intended to be a reminder—you know, for all his faults, and for the things that don’t work—a reminder of the things that have and the things that are and the things that might be,” Ryan D’Agostino told me in a phone interview. “He might have tweeted something that the SEC didn’t like, but in the grand scheme of humanity, we kind of need this guy out there doing what he’s doing with his money and his dreams.”

D’Agostino said he decided to do the project after reading a slew of negative press of Musk and his properties, and, as he put it in the final collection, “myopic and small-brained” criticism. He cited as examples news coverage of the misleading tweet about Tesla, the ensuing SEC debacle, Musk’s weed experience on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and the entrepreneur’s relationship with the singer Grimes.

“It seemed to us there were a lot of people who were sort of gleefully piling on or seeing this as an opportunity to pile on Elon Musk,” D’Agostino said. “Certainly he is not above criticism or anything like that, but I don’t know, I thought it was time to sort of say, wait a minute.”