Just who is this ‘eccentric Rocket Man’?
GUY ADAMS
EXCEPT for one sticky moment when US astronaut Doug Hurley appeared to clobber his head on an entry hatch of the International Space Station, it all went like a dream. A 19-hour flight followed by a flawless piece of zero-orbit parking last weekend saw the Space X capsule reach its destination.
Watching was an audience of tens of millions. To some, the so-far-successful mission recalls the heyday of American space exploration, when the world gathered around television sets to watch the likes of Neil Armstrong take giant leaps for mankind.
Yet the man behind this brave new era is no ordinary Nasa boffin. Space X is the brainchild of Elon Musk, an eccentric Silicon Valley tycoon who brought the world Paypal and Tesla cars, and is now devoting his $37 billion fortune to going where no man has gone before.
Musk launched the company in the early 2000s, announcing he intended, within a few decades, not only to put an astronaut on Mars, but also to be taking the first steps to establish a human colony there, thus ensuring humankind’s future, should Earth one day become uninhabitable.
But who is this eccentric rocket man? Nicknamed “genius boy”, Musk purportedly read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in early childhood and learnt to “code” at the age of 10, within days of acquiring a computer. By 12, he’d created and sold his first tech product, a video game called Blastar, for £500.
It was not, however, a happy childhood. The 48-year-old was born in South Africa, one of three children of engineer Errol Musk and his author wife, Maye. His parents divorced when he was eight. At school, he was bullied. At home, things were barely better.
Errol, from whom he’s been estranged for years, was a strict disciplinarian. In 2018, it emerged that Errol had a fathered child with his stepdaughter Jana. Musk told Rolling Stone magazine that Errol was “a terrible human being”.
By the age of 17, Musk was desperate to escape South Africa and his overbearing dad, so decided to head for Canada, where his mother Maye had grown up. He arrived without a penny, relying on the generosity of relatives for accommodation and living for weeks at a time off economy-size bags of hot dogs. Eventually, he won a place at the University of Pennsylvania to study Economics and Physics. After graduating, Musk headed to Silicon Valley, where in 1995 he was accepted for a PHD course at Stanford University. However, he dropped out in his first week to start Zip2, which developed software for media companies.
The timing could not have been better: Zip2 rode the internet boom and was sold in 1999 for $341 million, netting Musk a $22m cut. But that was just the start. Musk proceeded to join the ranks of the global super-rich with his next bet: an online bank called X.com, which was eventually sold to ebay in 2002, earning him roughly $180m. The cash allowed him to dream big. That year, he founded Spacex, announcing that his end goal was to build a “Big F ****** Rocket” to help colonise Mars.
In 2003 and 2004, Musk also made timely bets on the alternative energy sector, founding a company called Solarcity, which is now America’s largest installer of solar panels, and Tesla, the luxury electric car firm, which has revolutionised the motor industry. His logic was that helping to wean the world off oil would buy extra time to address global warming.
Wealth and success appear to have made the geeky Musk attractive to women. His first wife, Justine Wilson, a fantasy novelist whom he’d met at university, grew tired of spending all day at home with their five sons – a set of twins and a set of triplets. They divorced in 2008. Within weeks, Musk had moved on to the British actress Talulah Riley, whom he married, then divorced in 2012, remarried in 2013, then divorced again in 2015.
After a year-long dalliance with actress Amber Heard, Musk began stepping out with a Canadian indie musician Grimes, aka Claire Elise Boucher. Their son, born on May 4, made headlines after the couple attempted to register his name as “X AE A-12” (pronounced Ex ash A twelve’). Californian authorities refused on the grounds that it’s illegal to use numbers in a name, so the couple had to make do with X AE A-xii.
Sending men into space is a dangerous and complex task that requires clear heads, sharp thinking, and an extraordinary eye for detail. Especially when American taxpayers are footing the bill. All of which explains the kerfuffle in September 2018, when a dishevelled-looking Musk appeared on a podcast and proceeded to drink copious quantities of whisky and smoke a large marijuana cigarette, while discussing his life. Film of the appearance, in which the puce-faced tech tycoon coughed and spluttered his way through a haze of cannabis smoke, rapidly went viral, prompting Nasa to launch an urgent investigation into Spacex’s “adherence to a drug-free environment”. The Pentagon decided to review his Federal security clearance. Chastened, Musk wore a suit for more formal TV interview. “I do not smoke pot,” he said. “As anyone who has watched that podcast could tell, I have no idea how to smoke pot.”
Musk is a compulsive user of Twitter, posting endlessly, often at odd hours. This does not always dovetail well with his role as boss of Tesla, a $150bn company traded on the Nasdaq, which can make market-sensitive information public only in strictly regulated circumstances. Around the same time as the pot controversy, he used the social network to announce that he had “funding secured” to Tesla, private at $420 a share. The message may have been intended as a joke (“420” is slang for marijuana), but regulators did not see the funny side since Tesla shares were then trading at 20% less.
An investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates US markets, duly saw Musk charged with securities fraud.
In a settlement reached 2018, he agreed to step down as Tesla chairman for three years, pay a $20m fine, and grant a company lawyer oversight of future Tweets.
Yet last month, Musk embarked on a lengthy rant on the site during which he promised to sell “almost all” his physical possessions and declared that Tesla’s share price was “too high”, sending it down by nearly 12% in half an hour. The Securities and Exchange Commission has yet to comment on what action – if any – it plans to take. | Daily Mail
Ritchie is a journalist and a former newpaper editor