Well, if Broder's headline was "Tesla Employee Let My Car Run Down", he'd have been telling the story you can extract out of the text.
However, "Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway" somehow tells a story where blame is a lot more fuzzy.
Broder told a complicated story and put a poetically negative spin on it. It is entirely understandable that Musk would want to simplify this down to negative claims he could refute. This might seem unfair but I don't think it is because the New York Time reader isn't going say "well, either the driver, the Tesla employee or the car made some mistakes or just couldn't understand each other, what does this prove?", a reader in these days of simplification will just get "Tesla doesn't work in the cold" and so Musk is correct to refute this arguably false claim.
"Broder told a complicated story and put a poetically negative spin on it."
I will never forget when my friend and I released an iPhone app, and two years later Apple comes out with a product of the same name. My friend got contacted by a reporter asking these innocuous questions, for instance "do you expect Apple to remove your app from the App Store?". He said he doesn't expect any problems, but that we're willing to talk about it with Apple.
The headline? "Indie developer braces for legal battle over app named ###"
Looking back on it, the questions the reporter asked were absolutely leading questions to suit his own (anti-Apple) agenda. This is why anyone talking to the press needs to be very careful what they say.
I think "Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway" is actually a defendable claim, if we see the entire thing as a test of the current state of Tesla's recharging network. But claiming that their current recharging station network is not a drop in replacement for gas stations and gasoline fueled cars is of course a hugely unfair spin of a story about Tesla and electric cars in general.
However, "Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway" somehow tells a story where blame is a lot more fuzzy.
Broder told a complicated story and put a poetically negative spin on it. It is entirely understandable that Musk would want to simplify this down to negative claims he could refute. This might seem unfair but I don't think it is because the New York Time reader isn't going say "well, either the driver, the Tesla employee or the car made some mistakes or just couldn't understand each other, what does this prove?", a reader in these days of simplification will just get "Tesla doesn't work in the cold" and so Musk is correct to refute this arguably false claim.