Behind the electric curtain: What Tesla doesn't want you to know

A new book highlights the gap between Silicon Valley's self-aggrandisement and its actual operational competence

- Sundeep Khanna

Elon Musk at SpaceX in Texas in May.

Elon Musk is the news. He's omnipresent and omniscient. If the legacy news media misses anything about him, there's always his own platform X, to ensure nothing he does, says or even thinks, escapes our attention.

So what else could another book about the company tell us that we don't already know? The answer, as journalists Sonke Iwersen and Michael Verfurden demonstrate in The Tesla Files: The Inside Story of Musk's Empire, lies not in the subject matter itself but in the rigour and distance that investigative journalism can bring to bear on corporate mythology.

Musk's empire has grown to staggering proportions over the years. Tesla's market capitalisation has at times exceeded that of the next ten automakers combined; SpaceX, a startup owned by him, has revolutionised space travel while bagging billions in US government contracts. The Boring Company tunnels beneath major cities to ease traffic congestion while Neuralink promises to merge human consciousness with artificial intelligence. His acquisition of Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion transformed it into X, a personal megaphone to 400 million users. Meanwhile, Musk's net worth fluctuates between $300-400 billion, depending on Tesla's stock price on any given day. This is not merely a business empire we are talking about; it is a techno-feudal kingdom that spans industries and continents, with Musk as its mercurial sovereign.

For all this, the man isn't quite the masked superhero out to save the world from itself. The authors' perspective reveals something that US media coverage often misses: the profound gap between Silicon Valley's self-aggrandisement and its actual operational competence.