Elon Musk somehow finds the time for a growing number of budding projects: Tesla, his electric car company; SpaceX, his rocket company; the Boring Company, his underground tunnel solution for Los Angeles traffic; and the Hyperloop, his network of tubes rapidly moving passengers at several hundred miles per hour.
One thing he doesn’t have time for, though, is turtlenecks. In Neil Strauss’ extensive profile of the tech exec in Rolling Stone, Musk recounted one photoshoot where they tried to make him wear a black turtleneck — the trademark shirt of choice for Steve Jobs. Musk wasn’t feeling it.
“If I was dying and I had a turtleneck on,” Musk told Strauss, “with my last dying breath, I would take the turtleneck off and try to throw it as far away from my body as possible.”
The funny line stood out in an otherwise illuminating and dense piece. Here are a few other moments that stood out:
Amber Heard dumped him, and it hurt
Twitter has been fascinated over the fact that Musk is a human that feels pain and emotion like any other non-Silicon Valley “god.” But a red-eyed Musk had to collect himself when talking about the end of his relationship with Amber Heard.
“I just broke up with my girlfriend,” Musk said in his office. “I was really in love, and it hurt bad.”
Musk then added: “Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think.”
The exec then talked about how he was in “severe emotional pain for several weeks,” and needed to “psych himself up” to make it through a Tesla Model 3 event.
“If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy,” said Musk.
He’s not a big fan of his dad
The South African native said at 10-years-old he felt sorry for his father when his parents split. With his brother and sister going to live with his mom, he decided to live with his dad.
“It was not a good idea,” Musk told RS.
While Musk said his dad was a “brilliant” engineer, he also said he was a “terrible human being.” The Tesla co-founder didn’t go into details, but made it sound severe:
“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,” said Musk.
Musk said he eventually bought his dad a car, boat, and house in Malibu after making it big in Silicon Valley, but has since lost touch with him. He was irked his dad had the audacity to say he helped fund his first company, Zip2, a claim Musk rejected.
What’s he working toward?
There are easier projects for rich guys to tackle than space exploration and getting the world off fossil fuel. But he told Strauss he wants to do “useful things” — things that have a “value to the rest of society.”
“It would be better if we mitigated the effects of global warming and had cleaner air in our cities and weren’t drilling for vast amounts of coal, oil and gas in parts of the world that are problematic and will run out anyway,” said Musk.
And he’s still dead set on making humanity a “multiplanetary species.” Going to Mars, in his mind, is a safeguard against mass-extinction — something he points out has happened five times. “Unless you’re a cockroach or a mushroom – or a sponge – you’re f—-d.”