Review | Ludicrous: the unvarnished story of how Elon Musk brought his Tesla dream to life
- Journalist Edward Niedermeyer reveals the ugly reality hidden behind Tesla’s popular mythology, while giving the polarising Musk his due
- Behind the hype, Tesla still has problems that raise questions about its ultimate survival, he writes
Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer, pub. BenBella Books
Those who pay close attention to Elon Musk tend to fall into one of two camps.
One camp worships Musk as a modern-day hero at a time when heroes are in short supply. He is a green-energy wizard devoted to saving humanity from greenhouse gas destruction, and if that proves impossible, he wants to create colonies on Mars to save the human race from total destruction.
He is a brilliant entrepreneur who can wipe clean the ossified auto and space industries with paradigm-shifting innovations, Silicon Valley style. He reignited interest in space exploration. He made electric cars sexy.
The other camp believes none of it and denigrates Musk as a big talker and government-subsidy hound who promises far more than he’ll ever be able to deliver. Critics blast him as a hypocrite who traverses the globe (and sometimes commutes from near his Bel-Air, California home to his Hawthorne, California office) in his greenhouse-gas-spewing private jet, and contend he uses financial legerdemain to distract from the fact that he is unprofitably burning through other people’s billions while making himself rich.
