WSJ wins Pulitzer for Musk coverage

The Wall Street Journal has won a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for its covering of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.

The Pulitzers cited the coverage for “chronicling political and personal shifts of the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, including his turn to conservative politics, his use of legal and illegal drugs and his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

The Journal was named a finalist in international reporting for  its “courageous, cool-headed reporting by imprisoned journalist Evan Gershkovich and his colleagues that revealed a previously unknown Russian intelligence agency, and for gripping work on the workings of Russia’s secret services.”

It was also a finalist in investigative reporting  by Christopher Weaver, Anna Wilde Mathews, Mark Maremont, Tom McGinty and Andrew Mollica for a “lucid, comprehensive series that revealed how insurance companies gamed the Medicare Advantage system and collected billions of dollars for nonexistent ailments while shunting expensive cases onto the public.”

The winner in the investigative reporting category was Reuters for its “exposé of lax regulation in the U.S. and abroad that makes fentanyl, one of the world’s deadliest drugs, inexpensive and widely available to users in the United States.”

In addition, Alexandra Lange, a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for “graceful and genre-expanding writing about public spaces for families, deftly using interviews, observations and analysis to consider the architectural components that allow children and communities to thrive.”

The Journal won a Pulitzer in 2023 for investigative reporting for accountability reporting on financial conflicts of interest among officials at 50 federal agencies that revealed officials who traded stocks they regulated and other ethical violations.

It has now won 40 Pulitzers, considered the highest honor in journalism.

See all of this year’s winners here.