Few journalists and their sources have fallen out as completely as Kara Swisher and Elon Musk. The reporter met the future billionaire in the late 1990s, when she was a tech correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and he was just another Silicon Valley boy wonder.
The art of storytelling is the art of simplification—of giving smooth contours and sharp points to messily loose-ended incidents. That’s why, when artists tell their life stories, the plethora of factual details is secondary to the emotions, the ideas, the insights, and the sublime style that distinguish their art.
