“Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow”, Neil Strauss2017-11-15 (Elon Musk (BP); backlinks)⁠:

Inside the inventor’s world-changing plans to inhabit outer space, revolutionize high-speed transportation, reinvent cars—and hopefully find love along the way.

…At least, most of the world. “I’m looking at the short losses”, Musk says, transfixed by CNBC on his iPhone. He speaks to his kids without looking up. “Guys, check this out: Tesla has the highest short position in the entire stock market. A $10.96^$9₂₀₁₇ billion short position.” His children lean over the phone, looking at a table full of numbers that I don’t understand. So his 13-year-old, Griffin, explains it to me: “They’re betting that the stock goes down, and they’re getting money off that. But it went up high, so they lost an insane amount of money.”

“They’re jerks who want us to die”, Musk elaborates. “They’re constantly trying to make up false rumors and amplify any negative rumors. It’s a really big incentive to lie and attack my integrity. It’s really awful. It’s…” He trails off, as he often does when preoccupied by a thought. I try to help: “Unethical?” “It’s…” He shakes his head and struggles for the right word, then says softly, “Hurtful.”

[Depressive phase] …When he finishes, I attempt to start the interview by asking about the Tesla Model 3 launch a week earlier, and what it felt like to stand onstage and tell the world he’d just pulled off a plan 14 years in the making: to bootstrap, with luxury electric cars, a mass-market electric car…Musk thinks for a while, begins to answer, then pauses. “Uh, actually, let me go to the restroom. Then I’ll ask you to repeat that question.” A longer pause. “I also have to unload other things from my mind.” 5 minutes later, Musk still hasn’t returned. Sam Teller, his chief of staff, says, “I’ll be right back.” Several minutes after that, they both reappear and huddle nearby, whispering to each other. Then Musk returns to his desk. “We can reschedule for another day if this is a bad time”, I offer. Musk clasps his hands on the surface of the desk, composes himself, and declines. “It might take me a little while to get into the rhythm of things.”

Then he heaves a sigh and ends his effort at composure. “I just broke up with my girlfriend”, he says hesitantly. “I was really in love, and it hurt bad.” He pauses and corrects himself: “Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think.” Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier: It felt unexpectedly, disappointingly, uncontrollably horrible to launch the Model 3. “I’ve been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks”, Musk elaborates. “Severe. It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I was morbid. And then I had to psych myself up: drink a couple of Red Bulls, hang out with positive people and then, like, tell myself: ‘I have all these people depending on me. All right, do it!’”

Minutes before the event, after meditating for pretty much the first time in his life to get centered, Musk chose a very telling song to drive onstage to: “R U Mine?” by the Arctic Monkeys.

Musk discusses the breakup for a few more minutes, then asks, earnestly, deadpan, “Is there anybody you think I should date? It’s so hard for me to even meet people.” He swallows and clarifies, stammering softly, “I’m looking for a long-term relationship. I’m not looking for a one-night stand. I’m looking for a serious companion or soulmate, that kind of thing.” I eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships haven’t worked in the long run: his marriage to writer Justine Musk, his marriage to actress Talulah Riley, and this new breakup with actress Amber Heard…The woman, it turns out, is Talulah Riley, his second wife. They met in 2008, and Musk proposed after 10 days together. They married in 2010, then divorced two years later, then remarried the following year, then filed for divorce again, then withdrew the filing, then re-filed for divorce and finally followed through with it.

…Musk shakes his head and grimaces: “If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.” I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence. Musk disagrees. Strongly. “It’s not true”, he replies petulantly. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.” He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues. “It’s not like I don’t know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there—and no one on the pillow next to you. F—K. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?”

There’s truth to what Musk is saying. It is lonely at the top. But not for everyone. It’s lonely at the top for those who were lonely at the bottom. “When I was a child, there’s one thing I said”, Musk continues. His demeanor is stiff, yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible, pushing against the retaining walls. “‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say.” His voice drops to a whisper. “I don’t want to be alone.” A ring of red forms around his eyes as he stares forward and sits frozen in silence. Musk is a titan, a visionary, a human-size lever pushing forward massive historical inevitabilities—the kind of person who comes around only a few times in a century—but in this moment, he seems like a child who is afraid of abandonment. And that may be the origin story of Musk’s superambitions, but more on that later.

…For the first 8 or so years of his life, Musk lived with his mother, Maye, a dietitian and model, and his father, Errol, an engineer, in Pretoria, South Africa. He rarely saw either of them. “I didn’t really have a primary nanny or anything”, Musk recalls. “I just had a housekeeper who was there to make sure I didn’t break anything. She wasn’t, like, watching me. I was off making explosives and reading books and building rockets and doing things that could have gotten me killed. I’m shocked that I have all my fingers.” He raises his hands and examines them, then lowers his digits. “I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.”

…Musk was around 10 at this time, and plunged in his own personal dark age. He’d recently made a move that would change his life. It was a wrong decision that came from the right place. When his parents split up two years before, he and his younger siblings—Kimbal and Tosca—stayed with their mom. But, Musk recounts, “I felt sorry for my father, because my mother had all 3 kids. He seemed very sad and lonely by himself. So I thought, ‘I can be company.’” He pauses while a movie’s worth of images seem to flicker through his mind. “Yeah, I was sad for my father. But I didn’t really understand at the time what kind of person he was.” He lets out a long, sad sigh, then says flatly about moving in with Dad, “It was not a good idea.”

According to Elon, Errol has an extremely high IQ—“brilliant at engineering, brilliant”—and was supposedly the youngest person to get a professional engineer’s qualification in South Africa. When Elon came to live with him in Lone Hill, a suburb of Johannesburg, Errol was, by his own account, making money in the often dangerous worlds of construction and emerald mining—at times so much that he claims he couldn’t close his safe. “I’m naturally good at engineering that’s because I inherited it from my father”, Musk says. “What’s very difficult for others is easy for me. For a while, I thought things were so obvious that everyone must know this.” Like what kinds of things? “Well, like how the wiring in a house works. And a circuit breaker, and alternating current and direct current, what amps and volts were, how to mix a fuel and oxidizers to create an explosive. I thought everyone knew this.”

But there was another side to Musk’s father that was just as important to making Elon who he is. “He was such a terrible human being”, Musk shares. “You have no idea.” His voice trembles, and he discusses a few of those things, but doesn’t go into specifics. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil”, he says. “He will plan evil.” Besides emotional abuse, did that include physical abuse? “My dad was not physically violent with me. He was only physically violent when I was very young.” (Errol countered via email that he only “smacked” Elon once, “on the bottom.”) Elon’s eyes turn red as he continues discussing his dad. “You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done. Um…” There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can’t bring himself to utter the words, at least not on the record. “It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.”

The tears run silently down his face. “I can’t remember the last time I cried.” He turns to Teller to confirm this. “You’ve never seen me cry.” “No”, Teller says. “I’ve never seen you cry.” The flow of tears stops as quickly as it began. And once more, Musk has the cold, impassive, but gentle stone face that is more familiar to the outside world.

Yet it’s now clear that this is not the face of someone without emotions, but the face of someone with a lot of emotions who had been forced to suppress them in order to survive a painful childhood.

…When he was 17, Musk left college and moved to his mother’s home country, Canada, later obtaining passports for his mother, brother and sister to join him there. His father did not wish him well, Musk recalls. “He said rather contentiously that I’d be back in 3 months, that I’m never going to make it, that I’m never going to make anything of myself. He called me an idiot all the time. That’s the tip of the iceberg, by the way.”

[Hypomania/physical energy] …Musk is in a different mood than he was at SpaceX, and that’s something that those who’ve come to know Musk observe. One moment, he may be reciting favorite lines from an animated TV show he just saw, the next he may be curtly giving detailed instructions, the next he may be ignoring you while lost in a thought, the next he may be asking for your advice on a problem, the next he may be breathless with laughter while riffing on a humorous tangent for 5 minutes, the next he may be acting as if you’ve both never met. And through it all, you learn not to take it personally, because chances are that it has nothing to do with you.

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