Over the years I've spent many, many hours on the phone supporting computer software, hardware and related tech issues for end users.
Some were bright, some not so much. Some were very bright and very educated, but were simply not technical animals. They were experts in their field, made staggering salaries and could argue like lawyers - but did not fathom computers in the slightest, nor did they care to. They could follow simple step by step instructions (generally) and that was sufficient to get them out of trouble, and out of my hair.
I strongly suspect that Broder, rather than being a deliberate saboteur as some insist, is simply one of those guys. As I recall, his journalism background is not in tech at all (though he reported on tech industries). He was a White House reporter and held various other political and economics-related journalism posts over the years. He was given the Tesla assignment by a NY Times editor; he did not seek it out (although he stated he was pleased to do it).
I believe it is mentioned somewhere in the coverage of this story that he made a great number of phone calls to Tesla during the assignment, IIRC about ten or twelve. I can understand two or three calls, but the number he made suggests to me a guy who needed constant handholding, i.e., he didn't have much confidence in his own ability to understand or assess the situations he was in from a technical point of view, and unfortunately, that meant he didn't have a handle on what that meant in terms of range. In other words, to be somewhat less than charitable, Broder didn't have a clue. He is a tech klutz, who was probably a bit embarrassed about that, but since he has a very respectable general intelligence level, he was deemed capable of reporting this story. It's even possible that he was assigned it because he had no tech background or savvy.
Circling back around to where I started, my experience dealing with guys like Broder convinces me it's quite possible he had no intent to screw up so badly, it's just that there's precious little difference in the results that a tech klutz can achieve inadvertently and those of a true saboteur. Example: I once took a frantic call from a badly overworked, vastly overpaid consultant who needed a replacement $3,000 solid-state-drive ultrabook overnighted to him; he had backed out of his garage and run over his old one, which he'd absentmindedly left in the driveway for a few minutes.
It's a paradigm change, folks, and there's a portion of the public - even New York Times writers - that just won't make a smooth transition to the future, whether they're for it or against it. We need to keep that in mind, and do our best to pave the road as smoothly as possible for them.
By the way, it's good that Elon is a successful serial entrepreneur of disruptive technologies. He would not do well in tech support...
