I thought a more reasonable path to this would be to join a startup or three, get rich and then spend the rest of your life getting a PhD, working on interesting problems, etc. No? ;)
Even if that stat is true, it isn't useful. It doesn't mean your chances must be one in ten, and it doesn't mean that the overall rate can't or won't rise in the future.
That means you've had 6 chances just by the time your colleagues have finished grad school. 0.9^6 = 0.53, so you have a 47% chance of being a multi-millionaire by the time your academic friends are even entering the rat race. Compare that to the article's "If you're 95th-percentile lucky you might get a post-doc position, then you have a 50-50 chance of getting a tenure track position." Your odds are about 10 times better with the tech startup.
Then consider that at a minimum, you should expect 2 years of postdoc and another 6 years before getting tenure. That's now 14 years of training before you can actually work on what you want. 14 startup attempts with a 90% failure rate gives you a roughly 80% chance of success. The startup path is starting to look mighty good...