Power Play

Tim Higgins covered Tesla for the Wall Street Journal and wrote this account of the company from the founding disputes through the Model 3 production crisis and into 2020. It is reported journalism based on interviews with executives, engineers and investors, most of them former employees.

The operational core is the Model 3 ramp in 2017 and 2018. Higgins documents the decision to automate assembly steps that could not be automated reliably, the removal and rebuilding of production lines, the tent erected in the Fremont car park to add a third assembly line, the cash position that came within weeks of exhausting itself, and the personal conduct of Elon Musk during the period. He also covers the earlier history: the conflict between Musk and Martin Eberhard, the Roadster's development problems, the 2008 near-failure resolved by a financing round completed at the end of the year, the Model S launch, the Daimler and Toyota investments, and the acquisition of SolarCity.

Higgins is even-handed on the central question, which is whether Musk's methods were necessary to the outcome or nearly destroyed it. He documents both the decisions that worked, including the vertical integration and the direct sales model, and the ones that did not. The book was published in 2021 and stops before the Berlin and Austin factories reached volume, before the share price movements of 2021 and 2022, and before Musk's acquisition of Twitter. Readers should treat the sourcing as weighted toward people who left the company.