Hi, this is Christopher Cox. I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine, and this week's

Sunday read features a recent story of mine about Elon Musk and Tesla. So Tesla is facing

a difficult few months. As I speak, five separate lawsuits against Musk's electric car company

are set to go to trial for crashes involving autopilot, one of its self-driving products.

In four of those cases, the crashes were fatal. I've been tracking these lawsuits for about

a year now, and in the beginning, I was mainly interested in the ethical questions raised

by self-driving technology. How do we assign blame when a computer is involved in a car crash?

As I learned more about autopilot and has this full self-driving program, I discovered that

there's a more basic question that hasn't yet been answered. Are these cars actually ready

for the road? I went on test drives with Tesla owners who are convinced the answer is yes,

but then the cars nearly steered themselves into serious crashes while I was in the passenger

seat. Recently, Tesla announced that it was recalling more than 360,000 vehicles because

of problems with its full self-driving system. Eventually, I realized that the key to understanding

Tesla's headlong pursuit of self-driving and the resulting court cases could be found

in Elon Musk's personal philosophy of risk, which he's revealed in his public statements

and in previously unpublished correspondence that I uncovered. The good news is that

Musk seems to be motivated by an earnest desire to save lives. But whether the experiment

he's running on our roads and highways will produce that outcome, that remains an open

question. So here's my article, Elon Musk's appetite

for destruction, read by James Patrick Cronin.

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