Elon Musk as depicted by Reuters
See update at end of story
A story about Las Vegas won a Pulitzer Prize today–but not written by any locals.
A team of reporters at Reuters shared the National Reporting prize for writing about nefarious business activities of Elon Musk. One of those stories, published on July 23, 2023, focused on a Las Vegas-area office of Tesla devoted to talking Tesla drivers out of demanding better battery performance for their electric vehicles.To read the story, click here. That story, along with the series, has caused all kinds of hell for Musk.
I had the pleasure of having dinner with reporters Steve Stecklow, a long-ago colleague long before I became New To Las Vegas on the Philadelphia Bulletin, and Norihiko Shirouzu last year while they were gum-shoeing around town on that story for a few days. Stecklow is based at the Reuters home office in London, U.K., while Shirouzu works out of Austin, Tex.
The story is yet another example of the falsity of that old Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority marketing slogan, What Happens Here, Stays Here. I’m adding Musk as a candidate to my counter-list, It Didn’t Stay Here. It’s a roster of folks in trouble elsewhere for something that happened in Las Vegas. Musk joins such luminaries as Donald J. Trump (twice) and Joseph R. Biden Jr. You can see the full list nearby.
Sometimes, things about Las Vegas come into focus only from a distance.