On the contrary, I thought Hotz came off in the original article as a bit too arrogant when he basically bashed Tesla's autopilot in order to sell the reporter on his own project.

EDIT: For what it's worth, this may have been the angle the reporter wanted: reporters are very good at stroking your ego and getting you to tell them things you shouldn't be telling them. Nonetheless, revealing email correspondence about private business/job dealings is not very classy, whether or not you're a big company.