Father of Tesla, Exa Dark & Techno Mechanicus: Musk the businessman is all about Musk the man

Elon Musk – fabulous innovator, risk-taker, also hype-artist, and flamethrower. Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography – titled, unsurprisingly Elon Musk – locates Musk’s outsized gifts, his fearlessness, and his dysfunctions in his childhood. It’s Musk the man that explains Musk the businessman. The book’s better when it dissects the man.

Risk-taking ran in his blood; his grandparents were pilots and adventurers who dragged their young family through the Kalahari Desert to find a fabled lost city. His father was abusive and violent, his mother left the marriage.

As a child in South Africa in the 1980s, Musk was lonely, misunderstood and often went into trances when he concentrated on something. He was formed by his father, his exposure to engineering and building, his dark side and lack of empathy, his siege mentality, all stem from that early pain. He remains emotionally hostage to that experience, the book says. Apart from a few, he alienates employees and colleagues, is indifferent to expectations and disdains camaraderie.

His personal life is unconventional too. He prefers ‘intensity to intimacy’. Musk married his college girlfriend Justine Wilson, a writer of dark romance. At their wedding, he reportedly reminded her he was ‘the alpha in this relationship’.

Musk is obsessed with the collapse in fertility rates and has 11 children. After their first baby suddenly died, Musk was distraught, and he and Justine went on to have twins and triplets through IVF. One of them, Vivian has come out as transgender and taken her mother’s name, cutting all ties with her billionaire father whose politics she despises.

After splitting with Justine, Musk married and divorced the actress Talulah Riley twice. Riley said that her job was to stop him from being king-crazy: “People become king, and they go crazy.” His friendship with Riley continues to be the rare calming influence in his life. Unlike his relationship with the actress Amber Heard, which brought back his childhood terrors, and caused a near-breakdown in the ‘hellacious’ year of 2018.

He settled into marriage and then off-off romance with the singer Claire Boucher (known as Grimes), with whom he had a son X AE A-XII in 2020. He also shared photos of her C-section without her consent. He also has a daughter called Y, or Exa Dark Sideræl Musk and a son called Techno Mechanicus, or Tau.

Musk believes that smart people should have children, says Shivon Zilis, an employee at Neuralink, gaming buddy and friend, with whom he secretly had twins by IVF. Zilis was delivering her babies in the same ward as the surrogate who was delivering Musk’s daughter with Grimes. He also had an on-off relationship with the actress Natasha Bassett. The book also mentions, in passing fashion, the $250,000 settlement that SpaceX paid to a former flight attendant on his private jet who accused Musk of exposing himself to her.

The book portrays Musk as a drama magnet, unable to savour phases of success and peace. He needs to churn up his life and work, find new outlets for his ‘maniacal intensity’, speculating that Musk may be bipolar or on the Asperger’s spectrum. And ultimately, it suggests that the world can’t have one without the other, his epic achievements are simply the other side of his ‘demon-mode’. Being unfiltered and untethered might be integral to who he is: ‘would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as Musk unbound?’

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