Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

“My mind is not easily blown, but this place and this guy were amazing,” Downey later said. He asked that a Tesla Roadster be put in the movie set depicting Stark’s workshop. Musk later appeared briefly as himself in Iron Man 2.

Years later, Musk would admit that moving to Kwaj was a mistake. He should have waited for Vandenberg to become available. But that would have required patience, a virtue that he lacked.

As often happened with Musk, darkness gave way to silly humor.

Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process, and every specification needs to have a name attached. He can be quick to personalize blame when something goes wrong.

After the death of their son Nevada, Justine and Elon decided to get pregnant again as soon as possible. They went to an in vitro fertilization clinic, and in 2004 she gave birth to twins, Griffin and Xavier. Two years later, again through IVF, they had triplets: Kai, Saxon, and Damian.

when I recounted to Justine all the calamities at SpaceX and Tesla that were hitting him in 2008, she started to cry. “He didn’t share these things with me,” she says. “I don’t think it occurred to him that maybe it would’ve been very helpful. He was in such a combative relationship with the world.

The main thing she missed in him was empathy. “He’s a great man in a lot of ways,” she says, “but it’s that lack of empathy that always gives me pause.”

During a drive one day, she tried to explain to him the concept of true empathy. He kept making it something cerebral, and he explained how, with his Asperger’s, he had taught himself to be more psychologically astute. “No, it has nothing to do with thinking or analysis or reading the other person,” she said. “It involves feeling. You feel the other person.” He conce...

“The strong will and emotional distance that makes him difficult as a husband,” Justine concedes, “may be reasons for h...

“When you’re from a dysfunctional background or have a brain wired like his,” she says, “intensity takes the place of intimacy.” That’s not exactly right. Especially with his kids, Musk can feel strongly and be emotionally needy. He craves having someone around, even former girlfriends. But it’s true that what he lacks in daily intimacy he makes up for in intensity.

“I didn’t want to be a sideline player in the multimillion-dollar spectacle of my husband’s life,” she says. “I wanted to love and be loved, the way we had before he made all his millions.”

Justine’s version is that Elon gave her an ultimatum: either she accept the marriage for what it was or he would file for divorce. His version is that she had repeatedly said she wanted to get divorced, and he finally said, “I’m willing to stay married, but you have to promise not to be mean to me all the time.” When Justine made it clear that the current situation was unacceptable to her, he filed for divorce.

Talulah Riley, then twenty-two,

Riley had only recently moved out of her parents’ home, and she called the next morning to tell them about the man she had just met. As they were speaking, her father did a Google search. “This man is married and has five children,”

“I remember swimming around with him in the rooftop pool, very giddy, talking about how strange it was that we had known each other for about two weeks and were now engaged.”

But on the advice of his brother Kimbal, he decided, and Talulah concurred, that they should wait a couple of years before getting married.

Hearing the phrases that Errol had used in berating Elon shocked her, not only because they were brutal but because she had heard Elon use some of the same phrases when he was angry.

Saxon, his autistic son,

the years he would spend with her—from their meeting in 2008 to their second divorce in 2016—would end up being the longest stretch of relative stability in his life. If he had liked stability more than storm and drama, she would have been perfect for him.

Like many techies, he was liberal on social issues but with a dollop of libertarian resistance to regulations and political correctness.

He contributed to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton, and he was a vocal critic of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

after Trump won, Musk became cautiously optimistic that he might govern as a renegade independent rather than a resentful right-winger.

He urged Trump to set big goals—most notably sending humans to Mars—and let companies compete to fulfill them.

The only one who impressed Musk was Newt Gingrich, who was a space buff and shared his enthusiasm for letting private companies bid for missions.

He concluded that Trump as president was no different than he was as a candidate. The buffoonery was not just an act. “Trump might be one of the world’s best bullshitters ever,” he says. “Like my dad. Bullshitting can sometimes baffle the brain. If you just think of Trump as sort of a con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense.”

When the president pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord, an international agreement to fight climate change, Musk resigned from the presidential councils.

“She was just so toxic,” Kimbal says. “A nightmare.” Musk’s chief of staff Sam Teller compares her to a comic-book villain. “She was like the Joker in Batman,” he says. “She didn’t have a goal or aim other than chaos. She thrives on destabilizing everything.” She and Musk would stay up all night fighting, and then he would not be able to get up until the afternoon.

Girlfriend Amber Heard

When they got to the hotel, Elon and Amber had another of their flamethrowing fights. She locked herself in the room and started yelling that she was afraid she would be attacked and that Elon had taken her passport.

She came to the conclusion that Musk cultivated drama because he needed a lot of stimuli to keep him invigorated.

“Elon loves fire,” she says, “and sometimes it burns him.”

From Amber Heard

Musk’s personal life was transformed in May 2020 by the birth of a son who became known as X. The first of his three children with Grimes, X had an otherworldly sweetness that calmed and beguiled Musk, who craved his presence.

They were closely bonded yet also, paradoxically, slightly detached, cherishing each other’s presence but respecting each other’s space. Musk, like his own parents, was not overprotective or hovering. X was never clingy or dependent. There was a lot of interaction, but not a lot of cuddling.

X Æ A-12.

Name of one of his children

Named partly after Musk’s favorite character in the Marvel Comics X-Men series, Xavier was strong-willed and developed a deep hatred for capitalism and wealth.

There were long and bitter exchanges, in person and by text, in which Xavier repeatedly said, “I hate you and everything you stand for.” It was one factor that made Musk decide to sell his houses and live less lavishly, but that had little effect on the relationship. By 2020, the rift had become irreparable.

Xavier and Elon were already estranged when the sixteen-year-old decided to transition to female around the time X was born. “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now...

Musk would end up wrestling, often publicly, with transgender issues.

He would become more and more vocal on trans issues and, by 2023, was championing the conservative backlash against allowing medical support for kids under eighteen who wanted to transition.

Christiana insists that Elon is not prejudiced against gay or trans people. The rift with Jenna, she says, was caused more by her radical Marxism than her gender identity. Christiana speaks from some experience. She was at times estranged from her own billionaire father, and before marrying Kimbal she was married to the Black female rock star Deborah Anne Dyer,

His disagreements with Jenna, Musk says, “became intense when she went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil.” He partly blames what he calls the progressive woke indoctrination

The rift with Jenna, he says, pained him more than anything in his life since the infant death of his firstborn child Nevada.

Jenna’s anger made Musk sensitive to the backlash against billionaires. He believed that there was nothing wrong with becoming wealthy by building successful companies and keeping the money invested in them.

by 2020, he had come to feel that it was unproductive and unseemly to cash in those riches and lavish them on personal consumption.

“I am selling almost all physical possessions,” he tweeted three days before X was born. “Will own no house.” He explained to Joe Rogan the sentiment that led to that decision. “I think possessions kind of weigh you down and they’re an attack vector,”

“It’s draining to have to switch between so many issues,” he said when he finally relaxed on the plane. “But there are a lot of problems, and I have to solve them.” So, why was he now leaping into the world of AI and robots?

As for SpaceX, in the first quarter of 2022 it launched twice as much mass into orbit as all other companies and countries combined. In April it sent up its fourth manned mission to the International Space Station, carrying three astronauts for NASA (which still didn’t have its own launch capability) and one for the European Space Agency.

Usually at such moments of unnerving success, Musk manufactures a drama. He launches a surge, scrambles the jets, announces an unrealistic and unnecessary deadline. Autonomy Day, Starship stacking, solar roof installations, car production hell—he yanks the alarm chain and forces a fire drill. “Normally, he would go into one of his companies and find something to turn into a crisis,” Kimbal says. But this time, Musk didn’t do that. Instead, without fully thinking it through, he decided to buy Twitter.

His stock sales had left him with about $10 billion. “I didn’t want to just leave it in the bank,” he says, “so I asked myself what product I liked, and that was an easy question. It was Twitter.”

Twitter is an ideal—almost too ideal—playground for Musk. It rewards players who are impulsive, irreverent, and unfiltered,

When asked why he doesn’t restrain himself, he merrily admits that he too often “shoots himself in the foot” or “digs his own grave.” But life needs to be interesting and edgy, he says, then quotes his favorite line from the 2000 movie Gladiator: “Are you not entertained? Is that not why you are here?”