Ed Niedermeyer chronicled Elon Musk for over a decade. Inside the ‘surreal experience’ of being a longtime critic of the hype

Elon Musk is the richest man on the planet, and pretty much everyone has an opinion on him. Those who like Musk see him as a visionary who’s transformed the electric vehicle market, innovated space flight, and more. But a lot of people also dislike him — and he’s given them plenty of reasons why. He’s been revealed as someone who habitually misleads people or outright lies; he’s shown himself to be a racist; and he’s spent a lot of money to influence U.S. elections.

Musk used to enjoy a widespread respectable reputation, but that’s changed over the past six years or so, according to the journalist and author Ed Niedermeyer, who has covered the tech titan for more than a decade. Niedermeyer says he was early to recognize that Musk often lied, but even he didn’t know to what extent.

“It’s been a very surreal experience, in large part because I certainly never could have predicted that he would end up being the leading promoter of racism and right-wing political parties around the world and trying to topple governments and buy elections and all of that,” Niedermeyer says.

In 2019, Niedermeyer published Ludicrous, a book about Tesla’s problems. Next month, his next book focused on Tesla’s self-driving issues, Elon Take the Wheel, will hit shelves.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we talk to Niedermeyer about covering Musk in the early days, how his view of Musk has evolved, his involvement in Alex Gibney’s new “Musk” documentary, and more. —Thor Benson

I know you’ve covered Elon for just over a decade now, and I’m curious what got you started on that beat and what the early days were like?

I got into covering the auto industry kind of by accident, leaving school in 2008. I had to take the opportunities that I could find, and covering the auto industry was really interesting, but a little depressing. I was looking for signs of something new and exciting in that world.

There were some signs of that in electric cars and in a company in particular called Project Better Place that wanted to address the two biggest issues with electric cars — upfront cost and charging time — by selling cars without a battery and then basically having you swap batteries instead of charging. I thought it was a really exciting idea, but they burned like half a billion dollars and went bankrupt and disappeared.

And then in 2014, maybe a year and a half or so after Better Place went under, all of a sudden Tesla was talking about battery swap. That was very strange to me. I was confused because at Tesla, you own the battery. If you’ve taken good care of your battery and you swap it out, you might be getting a battery that has not been as well taken care of. It’s the most expensive part of your car, and it didn’t fit the business model.

They unveiled [battery swap] in December of 2014. And for about five months, I was looking regularly to try and find evidence that people were using it, and I couldn’t find it. On Memorial Day 2015, kind of on a whim, I went down to go check [whether battery swaps were happening] since I knew traffic would be busy. Long story short, [the battery swap center] wasn’t open.

They said they were contacting people who make the trip between L.A. and San Francisco regularly [about swapping batteries]. These people were lined up for chargers and said they’d never heard about this battery swap thing. Tesla made no effort to make it available.

Instead, they brought in chargers that were hooked up to diesel generators. I was very confused by what was going on until I dug further and found out that it was all a way to game California’s EV credit system. Tesla basically made hundreds of millions of dollars in additional credits, supposedly for promoting technology that would charge EVs faster. But of course, [Tesla] never made any serious effort to make [battery swapping] available or to develop it.

Long Shadow podcast: How Elon Musk broke the internet

The final episode of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet illuminates how Elon Musk, enraged by the COVID shutdowns, became radicalized by his own Twitter feed. A habitual user of social media, he becomes convinced that the systemic suppression of speech that he sees on Twitter is inhibiting humanity — and it’s crucial that he step in to buy the site in order to save mankind.

It’s a wild finale that explores how a toxic army of trolls goes after women in the gaming industry, giving birth to an online movement of disaffected men. This “manosphere” (and Musk’s support) contributes to the resurgence of Donald Trump and a constitutional crisis that holds American democracy in the balance.

Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?” The three-time Signal Award-winning podcast is out now. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And that experience kind of defined your coverage going forward?

In 2015, the hype was pretty strong. I found sort of a technological façade that was propping up a financial façade, and that the environment really didn’t seem to matter to them either. All of the things that everyone knew about Tesla turned out to, in one long weekend, kind of fall away. I realized that if you find a cockroach that big, there are always going to be more cockroaches.

I just started digging into every other aspect of the business and found all kinds of problems with their safety and legal compliance with safety regulations. They were basically offering people free and discounted repairs of defects in return for non-disclosure agreements, which prevented the customers from reporting them to the regulator. That is a really big deal, because that’s their only independent source of data about defects.

In those early days, I was pretty feisty. Fox Business was the only TV station that was at all interested in my reporting. It was also these kind of conservative Wall Street short sellers who thought that Tesla was already overvalued. In 2016, Tesla wrote a blog post about me saying that I was making up that non-disclosure story and that I was doing it for short sellers.

I didn’t even know what a short seller was. I spent a lot of time on Twitter fighting with the fans. Ultimately, I wrote the book in part because it felt like social media was this quagmire where you could fight every day and you never sort of got anywhere. You need a bigger picture to see what’s actually happening with these companies.

In 2016, Tesla really started to push the autopilot stuff too. I started a podcast then called “The Autonicast” with a couple of people and really started to study that whole technology. Tesla let a lot of its automotive ambitions fall by the wayside in favor of self-driving and broader AI stuff.

I’ve been following their trajectory. I spent the last 10 years educating myself about driving automation technology, talking to other developers in the space. That is what’s now going into my new book, which comes out in December.

Where were you writing about this kind of stuff in the early days, when you were writing about cars and then Tesla?

So, it started out in my personal blog. It was a different era. This was the time when everyone had a personal blog. Social media was not what it is now. That’s where I started. This was just my personal passion. Later, I was a contributor at Bloomberg and smuggled a lot more investigative reporting into Bloomberg Opinion.

I wasn’t supposed to do reporting, but I would smuggle a bunch of reporting into my columns. I wrote a bunch about Tesla there. Over the years, I’ve been asked to contribute to a number of outlets.

Showing some Lovie: Border Line War earns two Lovie Awards

 

From Norway to Kazakhstan, Russia’s neighbors hold a tenuous line with the world’s largest country. Along this new Iron Curtain, scenes show what it’s like living next to the ghost of an empire that insists it has no boundaries.

Border Line War, a Long Lead feature produced in collaboration with Magnum Photos and Decimal Studios, has won two Lovie Awards, one for Best Individual Editorial Feature and another for Best Use of Photography.

Prolific conflict photographer Thomas Dworzak traveled thousands of miles to document the multi-country resistance to Russia’s imperial aims, capturing protests, performances, museums, and military trainings along the Russian border. Accompanied by expert analysis from foreign affairs columnist and former Moscow bureau chief Christian Caryl, Border Line War shows how countries from the Arctic, through the Baltics, and down into the heart of Asia have held the line with the menace next door — and what it’s like when the cold wind of war blows through this new Iron Curtain.

Read the two-time Lovie Award-winning feature today.

What were your thoughts on Elon Musk as he started this kind of work? I assume they’ve adapted over time as he’s become a different type of public figure?

It has. I mean, everything about the story has evolved. It’s a very surreal experience to have been so critical so early and for both him and the company to sort of end up in even worse places than I could have predicted.

Certainly, his personal trajectory in terms of the Nazism and the extreme right-wing, let’s say, racism — all that stuff. There were hints of it in retrospect. I think what was really tricky was that I knew I was sort of out on a limb as a critic in the earlier days. I really avoided anything personal.

I really tried to play it straight. I really tried to focus my critiques on, “This is happening because people don’t understand the car business.” My first book is a lot about educating people on the car business, because I thought the problem was that people just don’t understand the car business. He’s able to get away with whatever because people lack this information.

By the time that book came out, it was already onto the self-driving stuff. The car stuff didn’t even matter anymore. Throughout the process, even though I had been early, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been constantly playing catch-up. It really took him entering government [to] catalyze a lot of popular backlash against him. For the first time — really when he bought Twitter and then entered government — there was this profound shift where, at least with a large audience, I was no longer having to convince people that he was bad.

Obviously, this documentary on Musk is getting a lot of attention, and I know you were involved in it. It certainly portrays him as a bad person. How did you get involved in it?

Well, it’s Alex Gibney’s movie. My involvement was that about three years ago, he reached out to me and said he was formally embarking on this project. I had been in touch with producers that worked with him in the past when he had been looking at doing stuff for Netflix, and they’d been looking at the Tesla story. I knew it was sort of on his radar.

I’m a consulting producer, so really a consultant. It’s been very much his story. I certainly advocated very strongly from the beginning to include the self-driving stuff in the narrative. One of the things I was able to bring to this is that there’s just so much going on with Elon, right? I’ve written two books now, and each one is just about one aspect of one company. Trying to do something about the whole guy is like this exercise in curation.

Alex shared my opinion that the self-driving piece is a really critical, central part of this. People who have followed me for a long time are very curious about the movie. I think it was really important for me when I finally saw the movie, because I wasn’t involved in the sort of creative process so much as just a consultant. What was amazing was that the movie definitely doesn’t reflect my story.

My influence is more on the film than my actual presence. I think what Alex really did well was create a movie that mirrors the broader public experience with the guy. It was where Alex came from, and he said in a couple of interviews he was generally pretty positive [about Musk].

He wasn’t a fanboy, but he generally was fairly favorable towards the guy and what he was doing. He actually has mentioned “Ludicrous,” my first book, as one of the books that really opened his eyes when he started this process. I think part of it is clearly that Musk has changed; he’s evolved.

A lot of people were satisfied with the popular narrative about this guy. They had some experience with him. Alex owned a Powerwall, and he sort of generally had a pretty positive experience with that. I think that really reflects what’s happened more broadly.

And you have a new book coming. Can you tell me about the premise there? Basically, the new one seems to be about Tesla’s self-driving efforts and how they’ve gone wrong?

Yeah. So it’s funny, because both of my books started basically in the summer of 2016. I started actually writing and doing the interviews for Ludicrous at the same time as I started this podcast, and I really started to do some more long-term research into understanding self-driving and what was going on there.

My north star throughout this whole [process] has been that I found [out] this really shocking thing with the battery swap station at the very beginning, and it was so at odds with the popular narrative. I didn’t assume that everything that Elon or Tesla says is a lie or fake or whatever, but I never assumed that it wasn’t. I never gave him the benefit of the doubt again.

He’s just been endlessly given the benefit of the doubt. I was able to begin this sort of long process of self-education about what’s really going on with this technology. The hope of the book is to sort of deconstruct what’s happened. I think that journey — it really has taken 10 years to untangle all of the different aspects of it.

I opened the book with a story from when I was a kid, going out to Central Oregon with my dad in a Jeep and being [allowed] to drive out in the desert. I would go home and tell my friends that I could drive. I know how to drive. They were like, “No, you can’t.” I was like, “What do you mean? I steered, I braked, I was controlling the vehicle myself.”

And they’re like, “But you weren’t driving in town, you didn’t have traffic lights, you didn’t have other traffic, you didn’t merge on the freeway.” I didn’t think about this until I started working on this book, but it’s a physical act. It’s a social construct.

The social construct is where this technology faces its challenges now. A lot of the physical act of driving — the technology has come a long way. What I really want people to take away from [my book] is a mental model for understanding this technology more broadly, because I think it is a really important technology, and it has a lot of potential. Basically, Elon Musk has been able to completely, just through language, pervert our popular understanding and discourse about it, and that will not lead to good outcomes. We kind of need to reset that as a society.

I also think there are really important lessons about how we develop tools with AI. AI really interrupts our traditional process of toolmaking, which is one of our defining attributes as a species. That’s also something that I try to use to frame this story, because I think it’s one of the most important issues that it brings up.

Further reading from Ed Niedermeyer:

• “Musk-Epstein: Dubai Dreams” (Niedermeyer’s blog, February 20, 2026)
• “The Tesla Takedown” (Niedermeyer’s blog, May 9, 2025)
• “Affordable Electric Cars Don’t Just Happen” (Inside EVs, May 28, 2024)
• Ludicrous (BenBella, 2019)
• “The Autonocast” (since 2016)