Tim Higgins
Tim Higgins is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal focused on technology and automotive stories.
He has written extensively about Apple, Tesla and Elon Musk, and appears regularly on CNBC as an on-air contributor. His first book “Power Play,” which explored how Tesla became the world’s most valuable auto maker, was a Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller.
His work has won several awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, or Sabew, and he has been a five-time finalist for the prestigious Livingston Awards.
Before joining the Journal in 2016, he worked for Bloomberg News. There, he reported on autos, tech and politics; wrote three Businessweek cover stories in 18 months; and broke the news that General Motors would name Mary Barra as chief executive.
A Missouri School of Journalism grad, he also earned an M.B.A. from Michigan State University.
He lives in San Francisco.
Description
A Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller
‘A deeply reported and business-savvy chronicle of Tesla’s wild ride’ –Walter Isaacson
‘A masterclass in narrative journalism’ –Bradley Hope
‘Exemplary’ –The Times
‘An exceptional work’ –Washington Post
Inside the outrageous, come-from-behind story of Elon Musk and Tesla’s bid to build the world’s greatest car and the race to drive the future.
Elon Musk is among the most controversial titans of Silicon Valley. To some he’s a genius and a visionary and to others he’s a mercurial huckster. Billions of dollars have been gained and lost on his tweets and his personal exploits are the stuff of tabloids. But for all his outrageous talk of mind-uploading and space travel, his most audacious vision is the one closest to the ground: the electric car.
When Tesla was founded in the 2000s, electric cars were novelties, trotted out and thrown on the scrap heap by carmakers for more than a century. But where most onlookers saw only failure, a small band of Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs saw potential and they pitted themselves against the biggest, fiercest business rivals in the world, setting out to make a car that was quicker, sexier, smoother, cleaner than the competition.
Tesla would undergo a truly hellish fifteen years, beset by rivals, pressured by investors, hobbled by whistleblowers, buoyed by its loyal supporters. Musk himself would often prove Tesla’s worst enemy–his antics repeatedly taking the company he had funded himself to the brink of collapse. Was he an underdog, an antihero, a conman, or some combination of the three?
Wall Street Journal tech and auto reporter Tim Higgins had a front-row seat for the drama: the pileups, wrestling for control, meltdowns, and the unlikeliest outcome of all, success. A story of power, recklessness, struggle, and triumph, Power Play is an exhilarating look at how a team of eccentrics and innovators beat the odds… and changed the future.
