"My only exercise is doing market research... my only hobbies are smoking and drinking tea" -Extremely Unhealthy to boot. If you are a billionaire and still cannot afford the time to take care of your health, what is the point of working so hard?
Let us NOT hold this guy up as some sort of paragon of hard work to be emulated.
Sure, but is that not what this story is doing anyway? Holding the frugality of a rich man as a great virtue and writing an article is indeed judging him on one trait
I think that you can be interesting enough to be worth an article even though you may have some other weak trait. All of us have some.
In this specific case I can assure you that smoking is seen differently in various countries. For example when I visited the US I was astonished to see that smoking was prohibited near most buildings, etc, which is totally a good thing, it's just not like that everywhere else.