New Delhi, Sept. 27 -- Elon Musk is the news. He's omnipresent and omniscient. If the legacy news media misses anything about him, there's always his own platform X, to ensure nothing he does, says or even thinks, escapes our attention.

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 co...