Power game

Brought to you by Penguin. At the heart of the audacious and inspiring story of Elon Musk and Tesla as they seek to build the world's greatest car and race to drive the future, Elon Musk is one of Silicon Valley's most controversial giants. To some, he's a genius and visionary; to others, a mercurial conman. He's made and lost billions of dollars with his tweets, and his personal exploits have become tabloid fodder. But for all his bold talk of mind uploading and space travel, his most audacious vision is closer to home: the electric car. When Tesla was founded in the 2000s, electric cars were just novelties, sold and scrapped by automakers for over a century. But where most onlookers saw only failure, a small group of Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs saw potential and pitted themselves against the world's biggest and fiercest business rivals. They set out to build a car that was faster, sexier, smoother, and cleaner than the competition. Tesla would undergo a truly hellish 15 years, besieged by competitors, pressured by investors, hampered by whistleblowers, and propped up by its loyal supporters. Musk himself often proved to be Tesla's own worst enemy—his actions repeatedly took the company he funded to the brink of collapse. Was he a weakling, an antihero, a fraud, or some combination of the three? Tim Higgins, technology and automotive reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had a front-row seat to the drama: the crashes, the fights for control, the meltdowns, and, most unlikely of all, success. A story of strength, recklessness, struggle, and triumph, Power Play is a thrilling look at how a team of eccentric and innovative individuals overcame the odds... and changed the future.