Friends and colleagues say his plans may be hard to predict, but they wouldn’t bet against him.
I have been watching Elon Musk for a number of years – and more closely than ever in recent months, since he decided, seemingly on a whim, to buy the social network Twitter.
He is one of the world’s richest men – sometimes the richest, depending on the price of Tesla shares, his main financial asset. With a string of other high-profile companies under his wing, including Tesla, Space X, Starlink, and Neuralink, he is also a subject of global fascination.
Then, of course, there is his own personal story – the tall, 51-year-old billionaire with 10 children ranging in age from one to 18. His first son died aged just 10 weeks. Musk, who was born in South Africa, has described living with Asperger’s syndrome, a type of autism, and stated that his main goal in life is to colonise Mars.
What I have learned is – as, perhaps, with many of us – there are many different faces of Elon Musk.
The persona he projects via his prolific tweets is provocative, controversial and bombastic. He loves a rude meme, knows whatever he says will make headlines around the world, and enjoys trolling the media with ever more outlandish statements and jokes. He likes trying to goad us journalists into writing ever more extreme headlines.
In public, he has learned to be a showman, whether dancing alongside electric-car-making robots, emerging triumphantly from the latest slick Tesla prototype, or being filmed walking into Twitter’s headquarters carrying a sink – “Let that sink in” was the gag, playing off a popular meme on the site. This Halloween, he attended a party in leather armour, a $7,500 costume called “the devil’s champion”.
And yet Tallulah Riley, his ex-wife, whom he married twice, described him in BBC documentary series The Elon Musk Show as “sweet” and “shy”.
Veteran Silicon Valley journalist and author Mike Malone, who has known Mr Musk for 20 years, tells me he sees “a very reserved, very smart, very introspective and intellectual guy” who spends long transatlantic flights with him reading complex trajectory tables, trying to work out how to land a spacecraft on Mars.
The pair have a long-standing $5 (£4) bet over Mr Musk’s ambition to send people to Mars by 2030. “I said, ‘I don’t think you can do it – but I hope you do. I hope I owe you the $5,'” Mr Malone says. “That bet’s still floating in the air”.
Sending people to Mars is a lifelong goal for Mr Musk. Some say it is his take on long-termism – a philosophy favoured by some very rich people which seeks to act in the interests of billions of people in the far future, rather than focusing on the immediate needs of the present.
