The award-winning reporter Andrew Norfolk had only just retired from the Times when he agreed to appear on one of its podcasts, The Story, to talk about Elon Musk, the businessman and adviser to the US president, at the start of this year. “This wasn’t how I intended to spend my 60th birthday,” he said.
Not only did Norfolk, who has died suddenly, refuse to promote his work on social media – he spent only two weeks on Twitter in 2010 as part of a deal to watch the World Cup final in South Africa – but his dogged, forensic reporting was in so many ways the antithesis to Musk’s inflammatory online commentary.
