Meet Murray Cox, The Man Trying to Take Down Airbnb
The Australian native runs Inside Airbnb, which uses the startup’s own data to highlight illegal listings in big cities.
Murray Cox stands for a photograph in New York, on April 25.
Photographer: Demetrius Freeman/BloombergMurray Cox chuckled when he was invited to a meeting with Airbnb representatives in downtown Manhattan in February.
For four years Cox has been publishing reports that cast Airbnb as a big-city housing-villain, but the company had never reached out to him before. A rendez-vous was set for a WeWork meeting room on Broadway, across the street from Airbnb Inc.’s offices in New York. Was the location suitable to Cox, Airbnb wanted to know? Well yes, Cox thought, or he could just walk downstairs since he works in the same building as Airbnb, close enough to connect to their Wi-Fi.
By day, Cox spends his time on the 27th floor of a corporate skyscraper as a vice president for a tech startup, surreptitiously riding the elevator with Airbnb employees who occupy space on the 26th floor. By night, the 46-year-old often sits on his couch in Brooklyn scraping Airbnb’s website, delivering curated statistics to cities around the world that are seeking to rein in the ever-expanding home-sharing giant.