My Lunch With Elon Musk
In this latest edition of "My Lunch With..." I sit down with the tech billionaire and renowned genius disruptor to find out what makes him tick.
Just getting time with Elon Musk is a challenge. After exchanging well over a hundred emails with his PA, an efficient young man named Noel Skum, it is finally agreed that the interview will take place in his private dining room, located several miles below his palatial home atop the semi-dormant volcano Mount Musk. A long list of conditions for the interview follow, including “During the interview, you must never look at Mr Musk’s torso” and “The interview will be terminated if at any time the interviewer comments on the fact that Mr Musk has without warning started speaking German.” I agree to all the conditions, including those specifying the country of origin of my footwear, and show up on the appointed date.
Ringing the front doorbell, I marvel at the fact that it plays the entirety of the Clash’s triple album Sandinista, before the door is opened by a seven-foot tall woman who introduces herself simply as “Aunt Clam”. She begins by stripping me naked and setting fire to my clothes, before giving me a once-over with a shiny silver wand she refers to as simply “the nasty detector”. Having determined that I contained no nasty, Aunt Clam smiles broadly and hands me a large cardboard box to wear.
Walking with Aunt Clam through the magisterial hallways of Musk Manor, I am struck by the decor: on every wall is a dazzling array of modern art interspersed with countless stuffed tarsiers. I ask Aunt Clam about these: she shakes her head sorrowfully and mutters cryptically about “the Easter Disaster”. More she will not say.
After several hours of walking, we reach an enormous pit filled with screaming apes. “Every one of these apes,” Aunt Clam informs me, “has been fitted with a Neuralink brain implant that has been programmed to cause them unimaginable pain unless they kill a human every 24 hours. If you wish to interview Mr Musk, you must now jump into the pit.”
The prospect is daunting, but I have faced greater challenges in journalism: my Good Weekend cover story on Tim Winton alone carried more danger to my person. I prepare dutifully to leap into the pit, but just as I am about to hurl myself into the heaving mass of homicidal primates, a metal floor emerges and slides across the top of the pit, covering it completely. At the same moment, Elon Musk himself drops out of a large perspex tube in the ceiling, and bounces to his feet in front of me.
“Congratulations!” he chirrups. “You have passed the test. You are pure of heart and may interview me.” He shakes my hand vigorously. In fact he refuses to let go of my hand and we walk, like high school sweethearts, fingers entwined, down another corridor to the Musk dining room. On the way I wonder what has become of Aunt Clam. I ask Musk and he laughs enigmatically. “Aunt Clam?” he replies, eyes revolving madly in their sockets. “Why, I know no Aunt Clam.”
I decide to let this drop, as the eye thing is extremely off-putting. Instead I admire the setting in the dining room. Although Musk assures me that we will be the only ones dining here today, the table has been set for eighteen. At every place around the table is a name card. I look curiously at a few as I walk to my own chair. “Henry Kissinger,” says one. “Anne Frank,” says another. A third bears the legend, “Paddington Bear”, and at the place beside it, “The guy who played that one weird dude in Cheers”.
I sit down at the place Musk indicates next to his own chair. The label in front of me reads, “An electric tennis racquet that can talk and feel shame”. Musk tells me not to worry too much about the name cards. “It’s just an experiment I’m doing,” he explains. “If all turns out well, it should result in a revolution in the way we process carbohydrates, but I should stress it’s in the very early stages.”
As the first course is served to us, in bowls that seem to be made from real pangolin hide, I begin the interview proper. Why, I ask, is Elon Musk so driven to continue seeking new challenges, given he has enough money to simply sit back and enjoy life?
Musk shakes his head. “I’m always disappointed when I hear people suggest I should just stop working and enjoy my wealth,” he says forcefully, frowning intently at his reflection in a spoon. “Sure, it would be easy for me to just sell up and spend the rest of my life riding genetically-modified llamas at the bottom of the sea. REALLY easy. But how would that help humanity progress? Look at this,” at this point Musk produces an enormous projector screen and switches on a projector he had hidden inside a large meat pie.
On the screen is projected the words, “NEVER STOP DISRUPTING”. Musk nods energetically at it, and clicks through to the next slide, which is an impressionistic charcoal rendering of a bison demanding its money back from Ticketmaster.
“You see?” says Musk, switching off the projector. “How can a man be happy, if every day he gets up and does nothing to facilitate the evolution of the human race? Did you know that before I invented space cars, human beings only had eight toes? You can look that up, it’s true. But here I come, and suddenly we’ve got so many toes the sky is basically the limit. Now, I can go lie on a beach somewhere, but that would mean admitting to myself that we’ve got all the toes we’ll ever need, and I’ll be damned if I’ll ever do that.”
I see his point, I say, but what about the bison? Musk explodes with anger, firing several harpoons into the chandelier. “You’re not supposed to take it LITERALLY!” he screams. “The bison is a METAPHOR! It represents all the chances we DON’T take, all the risks we AVOID because we’re too frightened to be GREAT. Are YOU frightened to be great?” he yells.
I stammer helplessly, uncertain of my answer, before realising he isn’t speaking to me. His question was addressed to a group of thirty or so Korean schoolchildren who have just wandered into the dining room on a guided tour. Dutifully, the children scream back at Musk that they are indeed not frightened to be great, and the maverick entrepreneur laughs indulgently and gives them all inflatable Tesla baseball bats.
For the next half hour there is silence in the dining room as Musk and I chew our way painfully through the dried apricot lasagne that has come up from his personal chef. When the meal is finished, he stands, wiping the mustard from his chin with a nearby tarsier. "
“I want to show you something,” he says, and without warning unzips his trousers and takes out a large Tupperware container. Removing the lid, he spills out a collection of human fingerbones of various sizes.
“Every one of these used to belong to an Osmond brother,” he says. “NOW do you believe I’m serious about fighting climate change?” With that, he changes into a wetsuit and runs abruptly from the room.
I follow, and find him sitting in a brightly-decorated room filled with bright orange beanbags. He sits on one, strumming a guitar. Smiling at me, he begins singing a melodic but sorrowful song about amortisation. When he’s finished he puts the guitar aside and tells me, with a sad smile, “You know, a lot of people forget that underneath all the money and the genius, I am a human being. I need love like everyone else.”
I begin to suspect that Musk is about to kiss me, but instead he takes a book from a shelf that I didn’t realise was there, and hands it to me. “When I was young,” he says earnestly, “I lacked direction. I didn’t know where I was going in life. This book helped me answer all the questions I had about what the world had in store for me. I’d like you to take it. I think it’ll tell you all you need to know about this Elon Musk character.”
I look at the book in my hand. We’re Going On A Bear Hunt. I look back at Musk. He’s nodding happily. “Aren’t we all, in our own way, going on a bear hunt?” he asks, clasping my hand again.
Still hand in hand, we walk back to the front door of the house, pausing only briefly so Musk can take a phone call from a man he refers to only as “Johannes”, instructing him to buy up all the biltong on the open market. “Got a plan for a new kind of seaplane,” he says by way of explanation.
Before we part, I have one more question for him. With all the controversy surrounding the acquisition of Twitter, I ask, does he ever regret dipping his toe in the waters of social media?
Musk’s dazzling smile comes out once again, his teeth shifting and spinning in that inimitable style. “Sometimes I doubt myself,” he admits. “Sometimes I think, did I do the right thing in rescuing free speech for the whole world? But then I think of the look on the face of a little girl I met yesterday. She walked up to me in the street and said, “Mr Musk, you buying Twitter is the reason my mummy and daddy got back together. I used to want to be a doctor, but now I want to be South African instead.” Then she went on her way. And that little girl’s name? Hillary Rodham Clinton. I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing it for her.”
I shake my head in awe at the breadth of Musk’s vision. Thanking him for the interview, I am suddenly overcome by the scent of chlorine, and wake up three days later in a Singapore Pizza Hut. When I try to call Musk, Aunt Clam answers the phone and denies the existence of anyone named Elon Musk. I politely turn down her offer of cheap lightbulbs for life, and realise that for the rest of my life, I will wonder…Elon Musk: man, or myth?