Walter Isaacson/Interview

Interview
Photoshoot
===Interviewhttps://www.google.com/books/edition/Elon_Musk/wUGvEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0===
Page 11:
The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment. “I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers,” says Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who is the mother of three of his other children. “I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain.” Musk agrees. “Adversity shaped me,” he says. “My pain threshold became very high.”
Page 13:
It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he made the pledge, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. That April, he snuck away to the Hawaiian house of his mentor Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, accompanied by the actress Natasha Bassett, an occasional girlfriend. He had been offered a board seat at Twitter, but over the weekend he concluded that wasn’t enough. It was in his nature to want total control. So he decided he would make a hostile bid to buy the company outright. Then he flew to Vancouver to meet Grimes. There he stayed up with her until 5 a.m. playing a new war-and-empire-building game, Elden Ring. Right after he finished, he pulled the trigger on his plan and went on Twitter. “I made an offer,” he announced.
Pages 309-310:
When the one-mile-long prototype tunnel was almost finished at the end of December 2018, Musk came by late one night with two of his sons and his girlfriend Claire Boucher, known as Grimes. They piled into a Tesla with custom wheels, and then a large elevator dropped them down forty feet into the tunnel. “Let’s go as fast as we can!” he said to Kuhn, who was driving. Grimes protested a bit, asking that they take it easy. Musk reverted to engineer mode, explaining why “the probability of longitudinal impact is extremely low.” And so Kuhn gunned it. “This is crazy,” Musk exulted. “This is going to change everything.”
Pages 363-367:
EM+CB
Every now and then, often at the most complex of times, the Creators of Our Simulation—those rascals who conjure up what we are led to believe is reality—drop in a sparky new element, one that creates chaotic new subplots. And thus into Musk’s life in the spring of 2018, amid the emotional tsunami caused by his breakup with Amber Heard, came a waiflike weaver of sounds, Claire Boucher, known as Grimes, a smart and spellbinding performance artist whose appearance would lead to three new children, on-and-off domesticity, and even a public battle with an unhinged rapper.
Born in Vancouver, Grimes had produced four albums by the time she started dating Musk. Drawing on science fiction themes and memes, her mesmerizing music combined sonic texture with elements of dream pop and electronica. She had an adventuresome intellectual curiosity that led her to become interested in eclectic ideas, such as a thought experiment known as Roko’s basilisk, which posits that artificial intelligence could get out of control and torture any human who had not helped it gain power. These are the types of things that she and Musk worry about. When Musk wanted to tweet a pun about it, he Google-searched to find an image, and he discovered that Grimes had made it an element of her 2015 music video “Flesh without Blood.” She and Musk got into a Twitter exchange that led, in the modern way, to direct messaging and texting.
They had met before and, ironically, it was when Musk was in an elevator with Amber Heard. “Remember that elevator meeting?” Grimes asked during a late-night conversation I had with her and Musk. “I mean that was super weird.” “Of all the times to meet,” Musk agreed. “You were staring at me very intensely.” 
“No,” she corrected, “you were the one giving me a weird stare.”
After they met again through the Roko’s basilisk exchange on Twitter, Musk invited her to fly up to Fremont to visit his factory, his idea of a good date. It was the end of March 2018, amid the crazed push to make five thousand cars per week. “We just walked the floor all night, and I watched him try to fix things,” Grimes says. The next night, while driving her to a restaurant, he showed how fast the car accelerated, then took his hands off the wheel, covered his eyes, and let her experience Autopilot. “I was like, oh shit, this guy is fucking crazy,” she says. “The car was signaling and changing lanes by itself. It felt like a scene out of a Marvel movie.” At the restaurant, he carved “EM+CB” on the wall.
When she compared his powers to those of Gandalf, he gave her a rapid-fire trivia test on Lord of the Rings. He wanted to see whether she was truly a faithful fan. She passed. “That mattered to me,” Musk says. As a gift, she gave him a box of animal bones she had collected. In the evenings, they listened to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and other history podcasts and audiobooks. “The only way I could be in a serious relationship is if the person I’m dating can also listen to an hour of, like, war history before bed,” she says. “Elon and I have gone through so many topics, like ancient Greece and Napoleon and the military strategies of World War One.”
This was all happening as Musk was going through his mental and work related tailspins of 2018. “Man, you seem like you’re in a really rough headspace,” she said to him. “Do you want me to bring my music stuff over and I can work at your house?” He said he would like that. He did not want to be lonely. She figured that she would stay with him for a few weeks, until his emotional turmoil settled down. “But the storm just sort of never stopped, and then you’re just on the ship and on the ride, and I just stayed there.” 
She accompanied him to the factory some nights when he was in battle mode. “He’s always looking out for what’s wrong with the motor, what’s wrong with the engine, the heat shield, the liquid oxygen valve,” she says. One night they went out to dinner, and Musk suddenly went silent, thinking. After a minute or two, he asked if she had a pen. She pulled an eyeliner out of her purse. He took it and began to draw on his napkin an idea for modifying an engine heat shield. “I realized that even when I was with him, there would be times when his mind would go somewhere else, usually to an issue at work,” she says.
In May, taking a brief break from the Tesla factory production hell, he flew with her to New York to attend the Metropolitan Museum’s annual gala, a glittery extravaganza featuring just-over-the-top fashion and costumes. Musk suggested ideas for her outfit, a medieval-punk black-and-white ensemble with a hard glass corset and a necklace made of spikes that resembled the Tesla logo. He even had someone from the Tesla design team help execute it. He wore a white shirt with clerical collar and a pure-white tuxedo jacket with the faint inscription novus ordo seclorum, a Latin phrase heralding a new order of the ages.
Rap battle
Despite wanting to help him through his turmoil, Grimes was not a calming influence. The intensity that made her an edgy artist brought with it a messy lifestyle. She stayed up most of the night and slept most of the day. She was demanding and distrustful of Musk’s household staff, and she had a difficult relationship with his mother.
Musk was a drama addict, and Grimes had a companion trait: she was a drama magnet. Whether she intended to or not, she attracted it. Just when the Thai cave incident and the turmoil about taking Tesla private were spinning out of control in August 2018, Grimes invited the rapper Azealia Banks to stay with her at Musk’s house and collaborate on some music. She had forgotten that she and Musk had made plans to visit Kimbal in Boulder. Grimes told Banks she could stay at the guesthouse for the weekend. On that Friday morning, three days after his “take private” tweet, Musk got up, did a workout, made a few calls, and caught a short glimpse of Banks in his house. When he’s focused on other things, he doesn’t pay much attention to the things around him. He wasn’t quite sure who she was, other than a friend of Grimes.
Upset that Grimes blew off their recording session so she could be with Musk, Banks unleashed a torrent of abuse on her well-followed Instagram. “I waited around all weekend while grimes coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on twitter while on acid,” she posted. This was false (Musk never used acid), but it understandably piqued the interest of not only the press but also the SEC. Banks’s postings about Grimes and Musk got progressively crazier:
:LOL, Elon musk is better off hiring an escort. At least an escort would have kept her mouth shut about his business. He’s got some dirty-sneaker-inbred-out of the woods Pabst beer pussy methhead-junkie running around town telling EVERYONE EVERYTHING ABOUT HIM. All because he needed a date to the Met Gala to hide his shrinking dick from Amber Heard LOL…. He’s on the Down syndrome spectrum. There’s something not quite right about that man. I wouldn’t give him the credit of calling him an alien. He’s a mutant…. Fucking crackers. The last time I try working with a white bitch.
When Business Insider did a phone interview with her, Banks connected the situation to Musk’s pledge to take Tesla private, which made matters legally worse. “I saw him in the kitchen tucking his tail in between his legs scrounging for investors to cover his ass after that tweet,” she said. “He was stressed and red in the face.”
By then, wacky stories involving Musk had a short shelf life. The story was a tabloid sensation for about a week, then died down after Banks posted a letter of apology. Grimes was able to turn the tale into grist for her music. She released a song in 2021 titled “100% Tragedy,” which she said was about “having to defeat Azealia Banks when she tried to destroy my life.”
Many shades of Musk
Despite such dramas, Grimes was a good partner for Musk. Like Amber Heard (and Musk himself), she was inclined toward chaos, but unlike Amber, hers was a chaos that was undergirded by kindness and even sweetness. “My Dungeons and Dragons alignment would be chaotic good,” she says, “whereas Amber’s is probably chaotic evil.” She realized that’s what made Amber enticing to Musk. “He’s attracted to chaotic evil. It’s about his father and what he grew up with, and he’s quick to fall back into being treated badly. He associates love with being mean or abusive. There’s an Errol-Amber through line.”
She enjoyed his intensity. One evening they went to see the 3D movie Alita: Battle Angel, but they arrived after all the 3D glasses were gone. Musk insisted they stay and watch it anyway, even though it was completely blurry. When Grimes was doing the voice recordings for the cyborg pop-star she played in the video game Cyberpunk 2077, he showed up at the studio wielding a two hundred-year-old gun and insisted that they give him a cameo. “The studio guys were like sweating,” Grimes says. Adds Musk, “I told them that I was armed but not dangerous.” They relented. The cybernetic implants in the game were a sci-fi version of what he was doing at Neuralink. “It hit close to home,” he says.
Her basic insight on Musk was that he was wired differently than others. “Asperger’s makes you a very difficult person,” she says. “He’s not good at reading the room. His emotional comprehension is just very different from the average human.” People should keep his psychological makeup in mind when judging him, she argues. “If someone has depression or anxiety, we sympathize But if they have Asperger’s we say he’s an asshole.” 
She learned to navigate the many modes of his personalities. “He has numerous minds and many fairly distinct personalities,” she says. “He moves between them at a very rapid pace. You just feel the air in the room change, and suddenly the whole situation is just transferred over to his other state.” She noticed that his different personalities had different tastes, even in music and décor. “My favorite version of E is the one who’s down for Burning Man and will sleep on a couch, eat canned soup, and be chill.” Her bête noire is the Elon that’s in what she calls demon mode. “Demon mode is when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain.”
One night, when they were at dinner with a group, I watched as the clouds gathered and Musk’s mood shifted. Grimes edged away from him. “When we hang out, I make sure I’m with the right Elon,” she later explained. “There are guys in that head who don’t like me, and I don’t like them.”
Sometimes one of the Elon versions will seem not to remember what another one has done. “You will say stuff to him and then he’ll just have no memory of it whatsoever, because he was in a brain space,” Grimes says. “If he’s focused on a particular thing, he will not get stimulation, not consume any inputs from the outside world. Stuff can be right in front of his eyes and he won’t see it.” Just like what happened when he was in grade school.
During the 2018 emotional turmoil at Tesla, she tried to coax him to relax. “Everything doesn’t need to suck,” she told him one night. “You don’t need to feel stoked about everything all the time.” But she also understood, in ways that others did not, that his restlessness was a driver of his success. So, too, was his demon mode, though that took her a little longer to appreciate. “Demon mode causes a lot of chaos,” she says, “but it also gets shit done.”
Page 381:
Afterward, he took Grimes for a spin in the prototype to Nobu restaurant, where the valet parkers just stared at it without touching. On the way out, pursued by paparazzi, he drove over a pylon in the parking lot with a “No Left Turn” sign and turned left.
Page 391:
The backyard has scrubby grass and a couple of palm trees that, despite being palm trees, wither in the August heat. The white brick wall in back is covered with squiggly grafitti art painted by Grimes, featuring red hearts and clouds with blue emoji-like bubbles. The solar-tiled roof is connected to two big Tesla Powerwalls. A shed in the backyard is sometimes used by Grimes as a studio or by Maye Musk as a bedroom.
Page 393:
Autonomy Day
Tesla, April 2019
Night after night, Musk sat upright on the edge of his bed next to Grimes, unable to sleep. Some nights he did not move until dawn. Tesla had survived the surges and storms of 2018, but it needed to raise another round of financing to keep operating, and the short-sellers were still circling like vultures. In March 2019, he reentered crisis-drama mode. “We have to raise money or we’re fucked,” he said to Grimes one dawn. He needed to come up with a grand idea that would turn the narrative around and convince investors that Tesla would become the world’s most valuable car company.
One night he left the light on and just stared into space silently. “Every couple hours I would wake up, and he was just still sitting there, in the thinking man statue pose, just completely silent on the edge of the bed,” Grimes says. When she woke up that morning, he said to her, “I solved it.” The solution, he explained, was for Tesla to host an Autonomy Day, where investors would get a demonstration of how Tesla was building a car that could drive itself.
Pages 402-406:
Family Life
2020
X Æ A-12
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. He took X everywhere. He would sit on his father’s lap through long meetings, ride on his shoulders around the Tesla and SpaceX factories, wander precariously through solar roof installation sites, turn Twitter’s lounge areas into his playground, and chatter away in the background during late-night conference calls. He and his father would repeatedly watch rocket launch videos together, and he learned to count down from ten before he could count up from one.
There was also a Musk-like quality to their interactions. 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.
Musk and Grimes, who conceived the child through in vitro fertilization, had planned to have a girl, but the fertilized egg that got implanted, as they were preparing to go to Burning Man in 2019, turned out to be male. They had already settled on what was (sort of) a girl’s name, Exa, as in exaflops, a supercomputer term for the ability to conduct one quintillion operations per second. Up until the day he was born, they were having trouble settling on names for a boy.
They ended up with what seemed like an autogenerated Druid password: X Æ A-12. The X represented, Grimes said, “the unknown variable.” Æ, a ligature from Latin and Old English pronounced “ash,” was “my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence).” The A-12, which had to be spelled A-Xii on the birth certificate because California does not permit numerals in a name, was Musk’s contribution, a reference to a great-looking spy plane known as the Archangel. “Fighting with information, not with weapons,” Grimes says of the A-12. “The third name is always a battle because Elon wants to delete them because he thinks it’s too busy. I’d go to like five names but three’s a compromise.”
When X was born, Musk took a picture of Grimes having a C-section and sent it around to friends and family, including her father and brothers. Grimes was understandably horrified and scrambled to get it deleted. “It was Elon’s Asperger’s coming out in full,” she says. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset.”
Page 409:
Once he finished selling his California homes, Musk moved to Texas, and Grimes soon followed. The small tract home in Boca Chica that he rented from SpaceX became his primary residence. He spent much of his time in Austin, where he borrowed the house of his PayPal friend Ken Howery, who had been ambassador to Sweden and then taken time off to travel the world. The eight thousand-square-foot home on a lake formed by the Colorado River was part of a gated development where many other Austin billionaires lived. It was a perfect place for him to gather his kids for holidays, until the Wall Street Journal reported that he was living there. “I stopped staying at Ken’s house after the Journal doxed me,” he says. “People kept trying to come around, and someone managed to get through the gates and into the house when I wasn’t there.”
Page 415:
To celebrate SpaceX’s successful launch, Musk went with Kimbal, Grimes, Luke Nosek, and a few others to a resort in the Everglades two hours south of Cape Canaveral. Nosek recalls that the historic “hugeness of the moment” began to hit them. They danced into the night, Kimbal jumping up at one point and shouting, “My brother has just sent astronauts up into space!”
Page 451:
Nights Out
Summer 2021
Saturday Night Live
“To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” Musk grinned sheepishly as he delivered his opening monologue as the guest host of Saturday Night Live. Shifting his weight from one leg to the other, he was doing a passable job of making his awkwardness charming.
That was his theme: showing that he could be self-aware about his emotional shortcomings. With the help of producer Lorne Michaels’s unerring sense of how to make a guest look good, he used his hosting gig in May 2021 to soften his image. “I’m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL—or at least the first to admit it,” he said. “I won’t make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight, but don’t worry, I’m pretty good at running ‘human’ in emulation mode.”
It was Mother’s Day, so Maye got a chance to come onstage. At the rehearsal on Friday, she read the cue cards and pronounced, “This isn’t funny.” She was given permission to improvise on some of her lines, which she did. “We made it more real and funnier,” she says. Grimes also appeared, in a sketch based on Super Mario Bros. One idea that they rehearsed, which played off of some of Musk’s anti-woke tweets, involved him playing a totally woke James Bond, but it didn’t gel and was cut from the show.
The afterparty was held at Ian Schrager’s downtown hot spot, the Public Hotel, which had been closed for COVID but reopened just for the event. Chris Rock, Alexander Skarsgård, and Colin Jost were there along with Grimes, Kimbal, Tosca, and Maye. Elon left around 6 a.m. and went with Kimbal and a few others to the house of Tim Urban, the internet writer, where he stayed up a few more hours talking. “He is such a nerdy guy that he didn’t really know how to party as a kid,” says Maye, “but now he’s really made up for it.”
Page 452:
For much of his birthday weekend, his friends left him alone so that he could sleep. He eventually woke up and gathered everyone for dinner at Flaps, the employee restaurant that SpaceX had built near the launchpad. Then they all went to his tiny house and gathered in the even tinier backyard studio cottage where Grimes worked. It was furnished only with big floor pillows, and they hung around—Musk lying flat on the floor with a pillow behind his neck—and talked until sunrise.
Page 453:
Elon came just for Saturday night and stayed in Kimbal’s encampment, which was centered around a lotus-shaped tent that provided room for forty people to dance or hang out. As was often the case, there was a ginned-up crisis —in this case, meetings about supply-chain problems at Tesla—that served as an excuse for him to not take much time off.
Grimes came with Elon, but their relationship was not going well. His romances often involved an unhealthy dose of mutual meanness, and the one with Grimes was no exception. Sometimes he would seem to thrive on the tension, demanding that Grimes do such things as shame him for being fat. When they arrived at Burning Man, they went into their trailer and didn’t emerge for hours. “I love you, but I don’t love you,” he told her. She replied that she felt the same. They were expecting another child via a surrogate at the end of the year, and they agreed that it would be easier to be co-parents if they weren’t involved romantically, so they broke up.
Grimes later expressed her feelings in a song she was working on, “Player of Games,” a fitting title on many levels for the ultimate strategy gamer:
:If I loved him any less
:I’d make him stay
:But he has to be the best
:Player of games…
:I’m in love with the greatest gamer
:But he’ll always love the game
:More than he loves me
:Sail away
:To the cold expanse of space
:Even love
:Couldn’t keep you in your place.
Pages 454-455:
Met Gala, September 2021
The breakup with Grimes did not last, or at least not totally. Instead, their relationship became a roller coaster of companionship, co-parenting, loneliness avoidance, boundary setting, estrangement, blocking, ghosting, and reembracing.
A few weeks after Burning Man, they flew from south Texas to New York for the Met Gala, the costume extravaganza that Grimes relished. They stayed with Maye in her small apartment in Greenwich Village. Musk had just sent his plane to pick up a Shiba Inu dog he had just bought, named Floki, the breed that is the face of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. He also brought his other dog, Marvin, who did not get along with Floki. Neither were housebroken. Maye’s apartment became a two-bedroom circus.
The outfit Grimes assembled for the Gala was an homage to the sci-fi novel and movie Dune: a sheer gown, a gray-and-black cape, a silver face mask, and a sword. Musk was ambivalent about going and, not surprisingly, found a workvexcuse to avoid arriving at the beginning. A Falcon 9 rocket was launching that night, and a bureaucratic snafu caused a delay in getting permission to reenter the spacecraft over Indian air space. It was readily resolved and probably did not require his attention, but he loved throwing himself into work dramas large and small.
After the Gala, he and Grimes hosted a party at the hot club Zero Bond in Manhattan’s NoHo neighborhood. Leonardo DiCaprio and Chis Rock were among the celebrities who came. But for much of the party, Musk stayed in a back room, mesmerized by a magician performing tricks. “I went to get him so he would come up front to greet people, but he wanted to stay longer watching the magician,” Maye says.
Having reached the pinnacle of celebrity in the summer of 2021, Musk found it exciting but awkward. The next day they went to an art installation Grimes had done as part of a trendy audiovisual exhibition in Brooklyn, featuring an animated video in which she played a war nymph navigating a dystopian future. From there they went directly to Musk’s jet and flew to Cape Canaveral for SpaceX’s attempt to be the first private company to launch civilians into space. Reality could trump fantasy.
Page 459:
The last time civilians were launched toward orbit was the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger mission carrying teacher Christa McAuliffe, which exploded a minute after takeoff. Grimes felt that was a psychic wound for America that needed to be healed, and Inspiration4 would do that. So she took on the role of “chief spell master,” casting good-luck charms on the rocket before it launched.
As usual during tense moments, Musk diverted his mind by thinking about the future. Sitting in the control room next to Kiko Dontchev, who was trying to focus on the countdown, he asked questions about the Starship system being built in Boca Chica and how to convince engineers to move there from Florida.
Hans Koenigsmann was attending his last launch. After working for twenty years at SpaceX, beginning with the hardy cadre that launched the original Falcon 1 flights on Kwaj, Musk had eased him out after the report he wrote about disobeying FAA weather orders. After the Inspiration4 rocket ascended, he went over and awkwardly hugged Musk to say goodbye. “I worried that I would get a little upset or emotional,” Koenigsmann says. “I had been there longer than anyone else.” They talked for a few minutes about how important this civilian mission would be to the history of space exploration. As Koenigsmann started to leave, Musk turned to his phone to check his Twitter feed. Grimes nudged him. “It’s his last mission,” she said.
“I know,” Musk replied, then looked up at Koenigsmann and nodded. “I was not offended by it,” Koenigsmann says. “Musk cares a lot, but he’s not emotionally nurturing.”
Pages 485-486:
What money can’t buy
If it’s true that money cannot buy happiness, one confirming data point was Musk’s mood when he became the person with the most of it. He was not happy
in the fall of 2021.
When he flew to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico for a birthday party Kimbal had organized for his wife Christiana in October, where Grimes performed as DJ, he shut himself in his room and played Polytopia much of the time. “We were underneath this art piece with interactive lights dancing to beautiful music from Claire [Grimes],” Christiana says. “I thought about how our good fortune was thanks to Elon, but he just couldn’t let himself enjoy the moment.”
As often happened, his mood swings and depression were manifest as stomach pains. He was throwing up and had intense heartburn. “Any great docs you’d recommend?” he texted me when he cut short his visit to Cabo. “They don’t need to be famous or have fancy offices.” I asked if he was all right. “I’m not super OK, tbh,” he responded. “I’ve been burning the candle at both ends with a flamethrower for a very long time. It has taken its toll. I was very ill this weekend.” A few weeks later, he opened up more. We spoke for more than two hours, much of it about the mental and physical scars he still had in 2021:
:From 2007 onwards, until maybe last year, it’s been nonstop pain. There’s a gun to your head, make Tesla work, pull a rabbit out of your hat, then pull another rabbit out of the hat. A stream of rabbits flying through the air. If the next rabbit does not come out, you’re dead. It takes a toll. You can’t be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you. But there’s something else I’ve found this year. It’s that fighting to survive keeps you going for quite a while. When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated every day.
This was an essential insight that Musk had about himself. When things were most dire, he got energized. It was the siege mentality from his South African childhood. But when he was not in survival-or-die mode, he felt unsettled. What should have been the good times were unnerving for him. It prompted him to launch surges, stir up dramas, throw himself into battles he could have bypassed, and bite off new endeavors.
That Thanksgiving, his mother and sister flew to Austin to celebrate with him, his four older sons, X, and Grimes. Two of his cousins and his two half sisters from his father’s second marriage were also there. “We needed to be with him because he gets lonely,” Maye says. “He loves to have family around and we have to do that for him, you know, because he’s under so much stress.”
Page 491:
Shivon’s twins
One thing that may have been distracting Musk on Thanksgiving 2021—or driving him to choose to be distracted by the nozzles and valves of the Raptor engine—was that, a week earlier, he had become the father of two more children, a twin boy and girl. The mother was Shivon Zilis, the bright-eyed AI investor he recruited in 2015 to work at OpenAI and who ended up as the top operations manager of Neuralink. She had become his very close friend, intellectual companion, and occasional gaming partner. “It’s been one of the most meaningful friendships of my life, like, by far,” she says. “Soon after I met him I said, ‘I hope we’re friends for life.’”
Zilis had been living in Silicon Valley and working at the Neuralink office in Fremont, but she moved to Austin shortly after Musk did, and she was part of his tight-knit social circle. Grimes considered her a friend and occasionally tried to set her up on dates. At the small 2020 party that Musk and Grimes threw for Halloween, a favorite holiday, Zilis was there along with Musk’s energetic SpaceX lieutenant, Mark Juncosa.
Grimes and Zilis connected to opposite facets of Musk’s personality. Grimes is feisty in a fun but also fiery way, often getting into fights with Musk and sharing his attraction to tumult. Zilis, on the contrary, says, “In six years, Elon and I have never, never gotten in a fight, never argued.” That’s a claim that few can make. They talk to each other in a low-key, intellectual way.
Page 493:
Baby Y
Even though they were in a rough patch in their relationship, Grimes and Musk were having such a great time being co-parents of X that they had decided to have another baby. “I really wanted him to have a daughter so bad,” she says. Because she had had a rough first pregnancy and her very slender body made her prone to complications, they decided to use a surrogate.
That led to an improbably weird and potentially awkward situation worthy of a new-age French farce. When Zilis was in the Austin hospital with complications from her pregnancy, so too was the surrogate mother carrying the baby girl that Musk and Grimes had secretly conceived in vitro. Because the surrogate mother was having a troubled pregnancy, Grimes was staying with her. She was unaware that Zilis was in a nearby room, or that she was pregnant by Musk. Perhaps it is no surprise that Musk decided to fly west that Thanksgiving weekend to deal with the simpler issues of rocket engineering.
When their daughter was born in December, just a few weeks after her twin half-siblings, Musk and Grimes began their drawn-out process of settling on names. At first they called her Sailor Mars, after one of the heroines in the Sailor Moon manga, which features female warriors who protect the solar system from evil. It seemed a fitting though not exactly conventional name for a child who might be destined to go to Mars. By April, they decided they needed to give her a less serious name (yes), because “she’s all sparkly and a lot goofier troll,” Grimes said. They settled on Exa Dark Sideræl, but then in early 2023 toyed with changing her name to Andromeda Synthesis Story Musk. For simplicity’s sake, they mainly just called her Y, or sometimes Why?, with a question mark as part of her name. “Elon always says we need to figure out what the question is before we can know the answers to the universe,” Grimes explains, referring to what he learned from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
When Musk and Grimes brought Y home from the hospital, they introduced her to X. Christiana Musk and other relatives were there, and everybody played on the floor as if they were a conventional family. Musk never said anything about just having twins with Shivon. After an hour of playing and a quick dinner, he scooped up X and took him on his jet to New York, where the toddler sat on his lap at the Time magazine ceremony anointing him Person of the Year.
Page 501:
A libertarian circle
One day early in 2022, Musk decided to throw an impromptu party at Tesla’s almost finished Giga Texas factory. His deputy Omead Afshar commandeered a prototype of the Cybertruck and had it lifted to one of the open spaces on the factory’s second floor. He set up a bar, used seats from unfinished cars to make a lounge space, and had a few assembly-line robots around for fun.
Musk invited his friend Luke Nosek, the PayPal cofounder and SpaceX investor, who suggested adding Joe Rogan, the proudly politically incorrect podcaster based in Austin, on whose show Musk had taken a toke during the turmoil of 2018. Nosek also invited Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and occasional anti-woke provocateur, who was visiting. Peterson arrived in a gray velvet collared jacket with a matching gray velvet–trimmed vest. After the party, a small group that included Musk, Rogan, Peterson, and Grimes went to Nosek’s house, where they talked until close to 3 a.m.
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Musk’s hopscotch path to the right in 2022 disconcerted his progressive friends, including his first wife Justine and current girlfriend Grimes. “The so called war against wokeism is one of the dumbest things ever,” Justine tweeted that year. When he began texting right-wing memes and conspiracy theories to Grimes, she replied, “Is this from 4chan or something? You’re actually starting to sound like someone from the far right.”
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Polytopia
One key to understanding Musk—his intensity, focus, competitiveness, die-hard attitudes, and love of strategy—is through his passion for video games. Hours of immersion became the way he let off (or built up) steam and honed his tactical skills and strategic thinking for business.
At age thirteen in South Africa, after teaching himself how to code, he wrote a video game called Blastar. He learned to hack ways to play arcade games for free, considered starting his own arcade, and interned at a game-making company. As an undergraduate, he began to focus on the genre known as strategy games—beginning with Civilization and Warcraft: Orcs and Humans —in which players take turns making moves as they compete to win a military or economic campaign using clever strategy, resource management, and decision tree tactical thinking.
In 2021, he became obsessed with a new multiplayer strategy game on his iPhone, Polytopia. In it, players choose to be one of sixteen characters, known as tribes, and compete to develop technologies, corner resources, and wage battles in order to build an empire. He became so good he was able to beat the game’s Swedish developer, Felix Ekenstam. What did his passion for the game say about him? “I am just wired for war, basically,” he answers.
Shivon Zilis downloaded it onto her phone so they could play together. “I just fell down a fucking rabbit hole, and there’s so many life lessons you learn, so many weird things about yourself and your opponents,” she says. One day in Boca Chica, after a tense argument with some engineers over the need for the safety chains being used when moving the Starship booster, Musk retreated to sit on a piece of equipment on the edge of the parking lot and played two intense games of Polytopia on his phone against Zilis, who was in Austin. “He just absolutely crushed me both games,” she says.
He also convinced Grimes to download the game. “He doesn’t have hobbies or ways to relax other than video games,” she says, “but he takes those so seriously that it gets very intense.” During one game when they had agreed to be a united front against other tribes, she surprise-attacked him with a flame ball. “It was one of our biggest fights ever,” she remembers. “He took it as this deep betrayal moment.” Grimes protested it was only a video game and not a big deal. “It’s a huge fucking deal,” he told her. He did not speak to her for the rest of the day.
On a visit to Tesla’s Berlin factory, he got so wrapped up in Polytopia that he delayed meetings with the local managers. His mother, who was on the trip, scolded him. “Yeah, I was wrong,” he conceded. “But it’s the best game ever.” During the ride home on his plane, he played it all night.
A couple of months later, in Cabo San Lucas for Christiana Musk’s birthday party, he spent hours by himself in his room or in the corner playing the game. “Come on, you got to come hang out,” she pleaded, but he refused. Kimbal had learned the game in order to bond closer with his brother. “He said it would teach me how to be a CEO like he was,” Kimbal says. “We called them Polytopia Life Lessons.” Among them:
Empathy is not an asset. “He knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business,” Kimbal says. “Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?”
Play life like a game. “I have this feeling,” Zilis once told Musk, “that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”
Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.
Be proactive. “I’m a little bit Canadian pacifist and reactive,” Zilis says. “My gameplay was a hundred percent reactive to what everyone else was doing, as opposed to thinking through my best strategy.” She realized that, like many women, this mirrored the way she behaved at work. Both Musk and Mark Juncosa told her that she could never win unless she took charge of setting the strategy.
Optimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to optimize each one. “Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in life,” Musk says. “If we let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.”
Double down. “Elon plays the game by always pushing the edge of what’s possible,” Zilis says. “And he’s always doubling down and putting everything back in the game to grow and grow. And it’s just like he’s just done his whole life.”
Pick your battles. In Polytopia, you might find yourself surrounded by six or more tribes, all taking swipes at you. If you swipe back at all of them, you’re going to lose. Musk never fully mastered that lesson, and Zilis found herself coaching him on it. “Dude, like, everyone’s swiping at you right now, but if you swipe back at too many, you’ll run out of resources,” she told him. She called that approach “front minimization.” It was a lesson she also tried and failed to teach him about his behavior on Twitter.
Unplug at times. “I had to stop playing because it was destroying my marriage,” Kimbal says. Shivon Zilis also deleted Polytopia from her phone. So did Grimes. And, for a while, Musk did so as well. “I had to take Polytopia off my phone because it was taking up too many brain cycles,” he says. “I started dreaming about Polytopia.” But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the game back onto his phone and was playing again.
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There was one contentious issue that they had to address. Gates had shorted Tesla stock, placing a big bet that it would go down in value. He turned out to be wrong. By the time he arrived in Austin, he had lost $1.5 billion. Musk had heard about it and was seething. Short-sellers occupied his innermost circle of hell. Gates said he was sorry, but that did not placate Musk. “I apologized to him,” Gates says. “Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.” 
The dispute reflected different mindsets. When I asked Gates why he had shorted Tesla, he explained that he had calculated that the supply of electric cars would get ahead of demand, causing prices to fall. I nodded but still had the same question: Why had he shorted the stock? Gates looked at me as if I had not understood what he just explained and then replied as if the answer was obvious: he thought that by shorting Tesla he could make money.
That way of thinking was alien to Musk. He believed in the mission of moving the world to electric vehicles, and he put all of his available money toward that goal, even when it did not seem like a safe investment. “How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?” he asked me a few days after Gates’s visit. “It’s pure hypocrisy. Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?”
Grimes added her own interpretation: “I imagine it’s a little bit of a dick measuring contest.”
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Brainstorming
Luke Nosek and Ken Howery, Musk’s close friends and fellow PayPal cofounders, paced around the mezzanine workspace of Giga Texas on the afternoon of April 6, waiting for him to finish his discussion on philanthropy with Birchall and then his call with Biden administration officials about China tariffs. He had been living at Howery’s house and also sometimes stayed at Nosek’s. “My two landlords!” he declared when he finally broke free and wandered over.
It was the day after the announcement that he was joining the Twitter board, and Nosek and Howery were skeptical about the decision. “It’s probably a recipe for trouble,” Musk merrily conceded as he sat down at a conference table overlooking the Tesla assembly lines. “I had a bunch of cash sitting around!” Howery and Nosek chuckled, then waited for more. “I think it’s important to have a forum that is trusted, or at least not too distrusted,” Musk added. The Twitter board, he complained, had little personal investment in the service, either as stockholders or users. “Parag is a technologist and has a medium idea of what’s going on, but it’s very clear that the inmates are running the asylum.”
He repeated his simple view that it would be good for democracy if Twitter stopped trying to restrict what users could say. “Twitter has to move more in the direction of free speech, at least as defined by the law,” he said. “Right now, Twitter’s suppression of speech is far in excess of the law.”
Despite sharing Musk’s libertarian views on free speech, Howery pushed back gently with some sophisticated thoughts, posed as gentle questions. “Should it be like a telephone system, where the words that go in one end come out exactly the same on the other end?” he asked. “Or do you think this is more like a system that is governing the discourse of the world, and maybe there should be some intelligence put into the algorithm that prioritizes and deprioritizes things?”
“Yeah, it’s a thorny question,” Musk answered. “There’s an ability to say something, and then there is also the issue of to what degree it’s promoted or demoted or amplified.” Perhaps the formula for promoting tweets should be more open. “It could be an open-source algorithm placed on GitHub so people can sift through it.” This was an idea that appealed to conservatives who felt that there were liberal biases secretly baked into the algorithm, but it didn’t really address the issue of whether Twitter should try to prevent the spread of dangerous, false, or harmful content.
Musk then threw out a few other ideas. “What if we charged people a small amount, like two dollars a month, to be verified?” he asked. This would become one of Musk’s core ideas for Twitter: making people subscribe using their credit card and cell phone number would be a way to verify and authenticate their identity. The algorithm could favor those users, who would probably be less likely to engage in scams, bullying, and spreading what they knew to be lies. It might reduce how quickly any discussion degenerated into comparing people to Nazis.
Getting a user’s credit card, he said, would have an additional advantage: it could facilitate turning Twitter into a payments platform where people could send money, hand out tips, and pay for stories, music, and videos. Because Howery and Nosek had been with Musk at PayPal, they liked the idea. “It could fulfill my original vision for X.com and PayPal,” Musk said with a gleeful laugh. From the very beginning, he saw the potential that Twitter could become what he had envisioned for X.com, a social network that supported financial transactions.
The conversation continued over a late dinner at the Pershing, an elegant but unpretentious club in Austin, where Nosek had reserved an upstairs room. Also there were Griffin and Saxon; Chris Anderson of TED, who was in town to record an interview for his upcoming conference; Maye, who had just arrived from Prague, where she was doing appearances for Vogue; and later Grimes.
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Vancouver
Grimes had been pushing Musk to go with her to her hometown of Vancouver, so that she could introduce X to her parents and aging grandparents. “My grandpa is an engineer, and he’s just been wanting a great-grandchild for so long,” Grimes says, “and my grandma’s super old and is just barely holding on.” 
They decided a good date would be Thursday, April 14, when Chris Anderson was hosting his annual TED Conference there. Anderson had taped an interview with Musk a week earlier at Giga Texas, but he was eager, especially given the fast-changing Twitter saga, to interview him live at the conference as well.
They arrived in Vancouver that Wednesday, April 13, Grimes from Austin and Musk from Hawaii. Musk went to a Nordstrom store to buy a black suit, since he had not brought one to Hawaii. That afternoon, Grimes took X on the seventy-five-mile trip to the town of Agassiz, where her grandparents lived, leaving Musk back at the hotel. “I could tell that he was in stress mode and all the Twitter stuff was happening,” she says.
Indeed it was. Late that afternoon, from his Vancouver hotel room, Musk texted Bret Taylor his official decision. “After several days of deliberation—this is obviously a matter of serious gravity—I have decided to move forward with taking Twitter private,” he said. “I will send you an offer letter tonight.” The letter read:
:I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.
:However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.
:As a result, I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium over the day before I began investing in Twitter and a 38% premium over the day before my investment was publicly announced. My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.
:Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.
That night, Musk attended a small dinner for TED speakers at a local restaurant. Instead of talking about Twitter, he asked the other guests about their views on the meaning of life. Then he and Grimes went back to their hotel, where he unwound by immersing himself in a new video game, Elden Ring, which he had downloaded onto his laptop.
The game involves navigating through a fantasy world filled with bizarre beasts that want to destroy you. Elaborately rendered with cryptic clues and strange plot twists, it requires intense focus and a lot of attention to detail, especially when it comes to calculating when to attack. “I played a couple of hours, then answered some texts and emails, then played some more,” he says. He spent a lot of time in the game’s most dangerous regions, a fiery-red demon hellscape known as Caelid. “Instead of sleeping,” Grimes said, “he played until five-thirty in the morning.”
Moments after he finished, he sent out a tweet: “I made an offer.”
Not since he crashed his McLaren by flooring it at Peter Thiel’s behest had there been such an expensive display of his impulsiveness.
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All my kids
“Happy Father’s Day. I love all my kids so much.”
On its surface, Musk’s tweet at 2 a.m. on Father’s Day—June 19, 2022— seemed innocuous, even sweet. But lurking beneath the word all was a drama. His trans daughter Jenna had just turned eighteen and gone to court in Los Angeles, where she lived with her mother, to change her name officially from Xavier Musk to Vivian Jenna Wilson. She called herself “Jenna,” which was similar to the name that her mother Justine used, Jennifer Wilson, before she met and married Musk. “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,” she declared to the court.
Musk had made peace with Jenna’s transitioning, even though he had not embraced the protocols about listing one’s pronouns. He believed that she was rejecting him because of her political ideology. “It’s full-on communism, and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil,” he said.
It was all very jangling for Musk. “We are simultaneously being told that gender differences do not exist and that genders are so profoundly different that irreversible surgery is the only option,” he tweeted that week. “Perhaps someone wiser than me can explain this dichotomy.” Then, almost as a memo to himself as well as a pronouncement, he added, “It is a better world if we are all less judgy.”
Jenna’s rejection made for a painful Father’s Day. “He loves Jenna so much and truly accepts her,” says Grimes, who stayed friendly with her. “I’ve never seen him as heartbroken about anything. I know he’d do anything to be able to see her or have her, like, accept him again.”
Adding to the turmoil was that the secret of the twin children he had with Shivon Zilis was made public. When they were born, they had been given her last name. But Musk’s estrangement from his daughter caused him to want to change that. “When Jenna deleted ‘Musk’ from her name, he was just really sad,” Zilis says. “And he asked me, ‘Hey, would you be open to our twins taking my name?’” The court filing they made soon leaked.
That’s when Grimes discovered that Zilis, whom she considered a friend, had given birth to twins with Musk. When she confronted Musk, he simply said Zilis had the right to do what she wanted. Grimes was outraged. By Father’s Day, they were all involved in contentious discussions over such issues as whether Zilis and her twins could spend time with Grimes’s children X and Y. It was a mess.
Musk and Zilis continued to attend weekly Neuralink meetings together without commenting on their parenting status. The way to defuse an awkward situation, he felt, was to joke about it on Twitter. “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” he tweeted. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
Techno Mechanicus Musk
As if Father’s Day 2022 was a multiplayer game, it had yet one other subplot. Secretly, Musk and Grimes had a third child that week, a son named Techno Mechanicus Musk. The boy, who was birthed by a surrogate mother, was nicknamed Tau, after the Greek letter representing the irrational number that is equal to two times pi. Its approximation, 6.28, reflected Musk’s own birthday, June 28.
They kept the existence of this third child private. But Musk was soon bonding with him. On a visit to Grimes’s home when Tau was two months old, he sat on the floor feeding baby food to Tau, who kept reaching up to play with the stubble on his father’s chin. “Tau is so amazing,” Grimes says. “He came out with eyes that could just see so deeply into your soul, with so much knowledge. He looks like a little Spock. He’s definitely a Vulcan.”
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Musk reacted to his family turmoil in the summer of 2022 by launching another surge, this one fatherly. He took his four older boys along with Grimes and X to Spain to vacation with James and Elisabeth Murdoch and their children. James, a member of the Tesla board, is the liberal member of the Rupert Murdoch family, and Elisabeth is more so. They provided Musk with a calming personal influence and political counterbalance.
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A house, not a home
Musk realized that it was difficult to have a stable family life if he didn’t have a family home. So amid the domestic drama in the summer of 2022, he started dreaming about a home of his own in Austin. He considered a few houses for sale, but deemed them too expensive. Instead, he decided to build one on a sprawling horse farm, with a tranquil lake, that he had bought right across the Colorado River from Giga Texas. He thought he might use other parts of the property for Neuralink and his other companies.
He walked the property one Saturday night with Grimes and Omead Afshar, who was in charge of building Giga Texas, and they came up with a variety of ideas, including that The Boring Company could dig a tunnel under the river to connect the house and the factory. He also walked the property a few days later with Shivon Zilis. “One thing I’ve been harassing him about, lovingly, is finding a place he can call home,” she says. “He needs a place where his soul resides, and that’s what the horse farm will be for him.”
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The tiki bar break-in
When Musk arrived in Boca Chica from Austin late that night, after conducting a Tesla shareholder meeting that resembled a fan club convention, he went right to the Starbase conference room, where the team had regathered. It looked like a scene out of Star Wars. Musk brought along X, who despite the late hour was fully charged and ran around the table shouting, “Rockets!” Also there was Grimes, who had dyed her hair pink and green. Juncosa had grown an even wilder beard. Shotwell had flown in from Los Angeles to help manage the personnel shake-up; a no-nonsense morning person, she commented that it was past her bedtime. The only other woman among the dozen or so at the table was Shana Diez, an MIT aeronautics engineer who had worked at SpaceX for fourteen years and, having impressed Musk with her plainspoken competence, was now director of Starship engineering. Filling out the table were the other members of the team—Bill Riley, Joe Petrzelka, Andy Krebs, Jake McKenzie— all wearing the standard uniform of jeans and a black T-shirt.
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Shortly after midnight, the deadline Musk had set, a truck with the upright booster started moving the half-mile down the road in Boca Chica from the assembly high bay to the launch site. Grimes drove over from their little house to witness the spectacle with X, who danced around the slowly moving rocket. When the booster got to the launch area and was placed upright on the pad, it made a dramatic scene glistening under an almost-full moon.
All was going well until a line broke loose and hydraulic fluid, a mix of oil and water, started spraying over the area. Everyone got doused, including Grimes and X. She was initially freaked out that it was some toxic chemical, but Musk told her not to worry. “I love the smell of hydraulic fluid in the morning,” he said, echoing a line from Apocalypse Now. X likewise was unfazed, even when Grimes rushed him back to the house to bathe. “I feel like he’s developing a higher than average tolerance for danger,” Musk said. Showing only the tiniest bit of self awareness, he added, “His tolerance for danger is almost problematic, honestly.”
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At a fiftieth birthday dinner for internet entrepreneur and fellow libertarian Sky Dayton in Tuscany in 2021, Sacks and Musk discussed how big tech companies were colluding to restrict free speech online. Sacks had a populist take, arguing that a “speech cartel” of corporate elites was weaponizing censorship to keep down outsiders. Grimes pushed back, but Musk generally sided with Sacks. He had not focused much on speech and censorship until then, but the issue resonated with his growing anti-woke sentiments. When Musk took over Twitter, Sacks became a fixture there, helping to coordinate meetings and offering advice.
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91
Rabbit Holes
Twitter, December 2022
@elonjet
Nothing would more surely make Musk go ballistic than a threat to his two-year-old son X, his constant companion and cheerful energizer. One Tuesday night in December, as the Twitter Files were unspooling, Musk perceived that such a threat had occurred, and the reverberations rattled the foundations of his proclaimed battle for free speech.
A longtime stalker of Grimes had been lurking for a day on the road around the house where she and Musk were staying in the Los Angeles area, and at one point, they say, he followed a car driven by one of Musk’s security detail that was taking X and his nanny to a nearby hotel. The security person pulled into a gas station and confronted the driver, taking a video of him dressed like a ninja with gloves and mask. The guy either jumped on the car hood or tried to climb over it when the car cornered him—the details were disputed—and when the police arrived they made no arrests. Using the video that Musk posted, the Washington Post tracked down the guy, who told the paper that he believed Grimes was sending him coded messages through her Instagram posts. Musk tweeted, “Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.”
Musk believed that the stalker had been able to find where he and Grimes were staying because of a Twitter account called @elonjet, run by a student named Jack Sweeney, that posted the real-time takeoffs and landings of Musk’s jet based on public flight information. The connection was murky: Musk had landed in Los Angeles a day before, but Grimes said that is when she started noticing the stalker’s car lurking outside.
Musk had long been infuriated by the @elonjet account, which he thought was doxing and endangering him. In April, when he was first thinking of buying Twitter, he discussed it at a dinner of friends and family in Austin, and both Grimes and his mother argued strongly that he should ban it. He agreed, but once he took over Twitter he decided not to. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” he tweeted in early November.
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The Sacramento raid
“Why don’t we do it right now?” James Musk asked.
He and his brother Andrew were flying with Elon from San Francisco to Austin on Friday evening, December 23, the day after the frustrating infrastructure meeting about how long it would take to move the servers out of the Sacramento facility. Avid skiers, they had planned to go by themselves to Tahoe for Christmas, but Elon that day invited them to come to Austin instead. James was reluctant. He was mentally exhausted and didn’t need more intensity, but Andrew convinced him that they should go. So that’s how they ended up on the plane—with Musk, Grimes, and X, along with Steve Davis and Nicole Hollander and their baby—listening to Elon complain about the servers.
They were somewhere over Las Vegas when James made his suggestion that they could move them now. It was the type of impulsive, impractical, surge-into the-breach idea that Musk loved. It was already late evening, but he told his pilot to divert, and they made a loop back up to Sacramento.
The only rental car they could find when they landed was a Toyota Corolla. Musk’s chief security guard drove, Grimes sat on Elon’s lap in the passenger seat, and others crammed into the back. They were not sure how they would even get inside the data center at night, but one very surprised Twitter staffer, a guy named Alex from Uzbekistan, was still there. He merrily let them in and showed them around.
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New Year’s Eve
Musk badly needed to decompress. He was not good at vacations, but a few times each year he would get away for two or three days to Lanai, Hawaii, to stay at one of the homes of his mentor, Larry Ellison, as he had done in April when he decided to buy Twitter. At the end of December, he went there with Grimes and X.
Ellison had recently built a domed astronomical observatory on the island with a one-meter mirror telescope weighing three thousand pounds. Musk asked to have it pointed toward Mars. After looking through the eyepiece for a while in silence, he called X over and lifted him up to see. “Look at this,” he said. “This is where you are going to live someday.”
Then he and Grimes and X flew to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to celebrate the welcome end to a tumultuous 2022 with Kimbal and his family. His four older sons were there. So were all of Kimbal’s. “It was good for our nervous system to be together,” Kimbal says. “We are a very complex family, and it’s really unusual for everyone to be happy at the same time.”
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“An awesome day”
The countdown that Monday was aborted with forty seconds left because of a valve problem, and the launch was rescheduled for three days later, April 20. Was the 4/20 date intentional, yet another reference to the 420 dope-smoking meme, along the lines of his $420 offer to take Tesla private and $54.20 offer to buy Twitter? In fact, it was mainly guided by weather predictions and readiness, but it amused Musk, who had been saying for weeks that the 4/20 date was “fated.” The filmmaker Jonah Nolan, who was documenting the mission, had a maxim that the most ironic outcome is the most likely. Musk added his corollary: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”
Musk had flown to Miami after the aborted first countdown to speak to an advertising conference and reassure them about his plans for Twitter. He arrived back in Boca Chica just after midnight on April 20, slept for three hours, then had some Red Bull and got to the launch control room at 4:30 a.m., four hours before the scheduled liftoff. Forty engineers and flight operations officers, many wearing “Occupy Mars!” T-shirts, sat in rows of consoles in a heat-shielded building with a view across the wetlands to the launchpad six miles away. At dawn, Grimes arrived with X, Y, and their new baby boy, Techno Mechanicus, known as Tau.
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That evening, a hundred or so SpaceX employees and friends gathered at the Tiki Bar at Starbase for a semi-celebratory party featuring slow-roasted suckling pig and dancing. Behind the bandstand were some older Starships, their stainless steel reflecting the lights from the party, with Mars, bright and red, rising as if on cue in the night sky just above them.
On one side of the lawn, Gwynne Shotwell talked to Hans Koenigsmann, the fourth employee of SpaceX, who had brought her to meet Musk twenty-one years earlier. Koenigsmann, a veteran of the Kwaj launches, had flown to south Texas on his own to watch this one as a spectator. He had not seen Musk since the Inspiration4 launch in 2021, when he was being eased out of the company. He thought about going over to say hello but decided against it. “Elon is not one for looking back and being sentimental,” he said. “He’s not good at that type of empathy.”
Musk and Grimes sat at one of the picnic tables with his mother, Maye, who had arrived late the night before after celebrating her seventy-fifth birthday in New York. She reminisced about how her parents had flown the family to explore South Africa’s Kalahari Desert every year when she was a child. Elon took after them, she said, one generation of risk-seekers passing along the trait to the next.
Category:InterviewCategory:2023