My Lunch With Elon Musk...The Return

How strange the ways we walk...

It’s been two years since my first interview with Elon Musk - now not only the world’s richest man but, according to his official biography, the inventor of the house brick. A lot has changed in those two years, starting with his home: whereas previously I had to travel deep within Mount Musk to reach Elon’s lair, now the multibillionaire resides on a sprawling cattle ranch in central Wyoming, reachable only by means of a horse-drawn carriage driven by a mysterious coachman whose face was covered except for two burning red eyes.

Security remains tight wherever Elon dwells. Upon arriving at the ranch, I am thrust under a chemical shower and ordered to eat my own shoes. A doctor examines me minutely to ensure that I have no live birds inside my body, and I must fill out a 200-page questionnaire about my political affiliations and memories of my grandfather before I am finally allowed to enter the main house, which I am told is the only house on Earth to be visible from New Zealand.

Elon himself is running late as he is in an important meeting with Kevin Sorbo, so I wait in the waiting room - an enormous space of over a thousand square feet, in which hundreds of other visitors also wait, all of them, strangely enough, with my face.

While I am waiting an assistant approaches me and asks if I would like something to read. I say yes, and she laughs hysterically. “You fucking loser,” she says, before handing me a sausage roll and showing me her tattoos. This happens several times.

Finally, it seems, it is time for my audience with the great man. I am ushered into the dining room, in which has been placed a small folding table with a chocolate cake on top. Elon enters, applauding. “Well played, Sir!” he cries. “Not everyone makes it this far.”

Elon Musk is taller than I remembered, though whether this is merely my poor memory or the fact that he is riding on the shoulders of a Kodiak bear is hard to say. He looks fit and well, his face bright red with exertion and several muscular lizards peeking out from beneath his shirt.

We sit down to eat the cake and I ask the question all the world wants to know the answer to: what does Elon Musk look for in a woman?

He smiles with practised ease. “For me,” he intones in a startlingly accurate impression of Lou Gossett Junior, “the most important thing to look for in a woman is a love of animals. Before I date anyone, I release numerous wild animals into her house, and see how she copes. If she panics, she’s not for me. Another thing I like in women is boobs. As many as possible.”

A lot of people, I point out, have found his passionate support of Donald Trump disappointing. What inspires his loyalty to the US president-elect?

“You may not understand the bond that Donald and I have,” says Musk, wiping his mouth with a skink. “But if you’d been there that day, you would. If you’d been there with us, deep in that dark and ominous forest, hearing the terrifying sounds of night all around. If you’d seen how Donald cradled me in his arms, soothed me with sweet songs, lit the fire and kept it burning all night along, and as day broke, helped me deliver that baby caribou…When you’ve shared that kind of experience the relationship becomes unbreakable.”

But does he really share Trump’s controversial political views? “There is only one political view that I am interested in,” Elon declares. And what is that? “I will never tell,” he says coquettishly, covering his face with a fan and slyly exposing his thigh. “All I can say is that it involves slacks.”

I wonder aloud why Musk agreed to today’s interview. “I wanted to bust a few myths,” he asserts loudly, writing “I WANT TO BUST A FEW MYTHS” on his napkin and showing it to me for emphasis. “For example, I wanted people to know that contrary to popular belief, I am NOT the richest man in the world. Unless you go strictly by monetary value, and by ‘the world’ you mean this one, I’m not even close.”

What are some other misconceptions that people might have about Elon Musk, I ask. “Well, take this story going around that I am in my fifties,” he scoffs. “I turned thirty-two last week, and I can prove it. Look at my birth certificate!” he cries triumphantly, slamming a piece of paper onto the table. I examine it carefully. It is a crude charcoal drawing of two elephants playing tennis. I nod, impressed.

The biggest myth about Elon Musk is that he has created an online alter ego named “Adrian Dittman”. But as he shows me here on the ranch, Adrian Dittman and he are two different people. This is proven when I am taken to a small concrete bunker, where Adrian Dittman himself lives. Sitting on a trapeze, rubbing curried egg into his hair, Dittman assures me that he is “just a fan”, and that he only posts online what he knows to be true. “When you meet someone like Elon,” he says thoughtfully, rubbing jelly into his nipples, “you realise that your life up till now has been shallow and pointless.” For the last thirty years Dittman was a veterinary nurse, but gave up his career in order to live on the Musk ranch, where he makes a living eating the household staff’s dead skin.

Back in the main house, Elon apologises but he has to attend an urgent meeting in Washington, where president-elect Trump has just discovered a donkey that can count and needs all his advisers to assist with next steps. He tells me I can let myself out, and hands me a suitcase filled with 40 pairs of denim shorts. “Everyone who visits here gets the same,” he says darkly, “if they know what’s good for them.” He says goodbye in what I now recognise as the traditional Musk way: by slicing off three of my toes with a machete. As I limp, bleeding, back to the carriage, I reflect on the strange ways in which we try to categorise and pathologise genius, and wonder if humankind is even ready for the kind of progress about to be made.