Behind Tesla's electric curtain: What Elon Musk doesn’t want you to know

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 start-up 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.

The central revelation of the book is breathtaking in its simplicity and devastating in its implications. Tesla, a company that positions itself at the vanguard of technological sophistication, that spends thousands on surveillance software to monitor data movements of its people, somehow allowed a single disgruntled employee to walk out with virtually everything: employee records, customer data, business partner information, legal documents, banking details, government correspondence, technical specifications, autopilot failure reports, and internal memoranda.

This data breach, orchestrated by whistleblower Lukasz Krupski, forms the spine of the book, though Iwersen and Verfurden take their time getting there. The authors, veterans of German business daily Handelsblatt that earned international recognition for its role in exposing the 2020 Wirecard fraud (a series of corrupt practices that led to the insolvency of the German payment financial services provider), bring the methodical approach of old-fashioned journalism to their subject. This is both the book’s strength and its occasional weakness. Where most current business writing often favours narrative velocity over analytical depth, the book’s approach stresses thoroughness, sometimes at the expense of pacing.

Indeed, its structural choices reflect this tension. Nearly half the book is devoted to familiar territory, including Musk’s South African childhood, his early ventures, the founding mythology of Tesla and SpaceX. This ground has been extensively covered, most comprehensively in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography, a 650-page doorstopper that left few stones unturned in chronicling Musk’s rise. While Iwersen and Verfurden do add some illuminating anecdotes—the image of Musk delivering an impassioned analyst presentation to a muted microphone while his team and the analysts sit in silent paralysis, afraid to interrupt, is both absurd and revealing—much of this material feels like necessary but insufficient table-setting.

The story comes to life when analysis of the data reveals a company whose internal culture bears little resemblance to its public image of innovation and progress. Tesla, as depicted through leaked documents and employee testimonials, operates more like a digital-age sweatshop than a revolutionary enterprise.

The contradictions are stark and numerous: Musk publicly smokes marijuana on Joe Rogan’s podcast while maintaining strict cannabis prohibition in Tesla factories; he champions Americans’ rights to carry arms on X while banning weapons from company premises; he positions himself as a champion of free speech while reportedly maintaining an atmosphere of surveillance and retaliation within his companies. These contradictions extend to Tesla’s treatment of its workforce.

Compared to German automotive giants like Volkswagen, where robust labour protections and worker representation are standard, Tesla’s employment practices seem almost deliberately punitive. The authors document how employees discover their termination not through human interaction but through technological failure: laptops that won’t let them log in, badges that stop working at factory gates. Sadly, this casual dehumanisation has metastasised beyond Silicon Valley, becoming equally commonplace in corporate India over the past five years.

But the most chilling revelations concern safety. The retractable door handles that Musk insists upon for aesthetic reasons have created deadly consequences in emergency situations. First responders, faced with burning Tesla vehicles, watched helplessly as passengers remained trapped inside, unable to access the concealed door mechanisms. The authors’ observation “Because Musk prefers the sleek look of Teslas without handles, he accepts the risk to his customers" cuts to the heart of a philosophy that prioritises one man’s whim over human life.

This utilitarian calculus, the authors suggest, reflects Musk’s admiration for philosopher William MacAskill’s effective altruism, a movement that weighs present suffering against theoretical future benefits. If millions must suffer today so billions can be saved tomorrow, the math seems to justify the sacrifice.

The Christmas anecdote that closes this section crystallises the dynamic. While Musk extracted billions in compensation for his “efforts," 12,000 Tesla employees received socks as their holiday bonus. The image is both pathetic and emblematic of a broader wealth concentration that has reached near-feudal proportions in contemporary American capitalism.

The Musk that emerges from this book is a bundle of contradictions. A tyrant who screams and yells when he wants something done, yet not averse to taking a dig at his own company. When stories broke about a factory director in Tesla’s German plant berating employees for the number of coffee mugs that went missing, Musk joined media outlets in capturing the absurdity with a “We were mugged" post. Clearly, he is neither the visionary saviour of his most ardent admirers nor the cartoon villain of his harshest critics. Instead, Iwersen and Verfurden present something more unsettling: a figure of genuine capability and innovation whose success has created a bubble of consequence-free decision-making.

What makes The Tesla Files particularly valuable is its demonstration that robust investigative journalism persists if we are willing to look beyond market valuations and maintain the critical distance necessary for genuine accountability reporting. The authors’ work recalls the tradition of investigative journalism that produced landmark exposes of corporate malfeasance, from Ida Tarbell’s Standard Oil investigation to more recent works like Brad Stone’s The Everything Store or Emily Chang’s Brotopia.

The book is not without its limitations. The authors occasionally seem uncertain whether they are writing a corporate expose or a business biography. The background material, while competently handled, lacks the personal insight of Isaacson’s work or the narrative drive of Ashlee Vance’s earlier Musk biography. Vitally, the book’s conclusion, examining the implications of tech billionaires’ increasing control over information flow, feels somewhat underdeveloped given its importance. With Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and Jeff Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post, the concentration of media power in the hands of tech entrepreneurs represents a fundamental challenge to democratic discourse. This deserves more than the brief treatment it receives here.

Despite these shortcomings, The Tesla Files succeeds as both journalism and warning. It reminds us that the distance between mythology and reality in corporate America has grown dangerously wide and that the tradition of sceptical, methodical investigation offers a necessary corrective to Silicon Valley’s self-congratulation. In an era when business journalism too often functions as stenography for entrepreneurial ego, Iwersen and Verfurden have shown the virtues of accountability reporting.

Perhaps the book’s most sobering insight is how little any of this seems to matter. Tesla’s stock price remains stratospheric, Musk’s influence continues to grow, and the contradictions between rhetoric and reality that The Tesla Files so carefully documents appear to have no meaningful impact on the company’s trajectory. This raises uncomfortable questions about the relationship between truth and consequence in contemporary capitalism.

Sundeep Khanna is a regular Mint columnist and author of business books.