More from the vaunted fact-checkers of the New Yorker

[See here and here for previous examples of us watching the New Yorker watchmen.]

Calling to mind the great Dianne Wiest line from Parenthood, there is so much to dislike about this recent New Yorker book review by Jon Allsop that it’s difficult to pick just one thing. There’s the general lack of knowledge about the subject, the misinformed treatment of Elon Musk (which cites the disastrous GQ interview), an attempted comparison between the turn-of-the-century interest in Martians and the Epstein case—an analogy so tortured the writer might as well have attached electrodes to its testicles. Time permitting, I may come back and address some or all of these, but for now I’m just going to focus on one example which, though relatively small, is both egregious and indicative of a larger journalistic failure that has caused no end of harm. "Musk, of course, named his car company after Tesla" I probably don’t have to tell this to anyone reading the blog. I certainly shouldn’t have to tell it to anyone writing about Tesla in a major publication. But Elon Musk not only did not name the company—he had nothing to do with it until it was about six months old, at which point he brought in a substantial chunk of money, entrenched himself in the operation, and began working to get himself named retroactive founder (because in the 21st century, that’s a thing). This isn’t just printing the legend; it’s printing the lie. And while this detail is minor, it’s part of a myth that has done extraordinary damage over the past 25 years: the myth of the Silicon Valley Visionary, the Tech Messiah. It’s a myth that has justified God knows how many crimes. It has elevated some of the most reprehensible people imaginable to positions of unprecedented wealth and power while convincing most of the media that they should be treated as sages and modern-day prophets. In particular, the legend of Elon Musk is virtually the sole justification for a market cap that made him the richest and one of the most powerful men in the world—and is about to make him considerably richer still. That valuation is inflated by well over one and quite possibly two orders of magnitude for a shrinking niche car company with a toxic brand and nothing but sci-fi vaporware in the product pipeline. If journalists can’t catch even the most basic, widely debunked lie about Elon Musk, how can they possibly dig through the layered falsehoods and impossible claims on which he has built his fortune?