The real-life Tony Stark leads a pretty wild lifestyle, even when he isn’t re-inventing
the car or stacking up gigantic shiny space rockets to blast our civilization off to mars.
But how much do we really know about his personal life? Did he actually run a nightclub back in
college? What about that time he attempted to buy second-hand space rockets off of the Russians?
Join us today as we meet the man behind the myth and
uncover 10 things you didn’t know about Elon Musk.
He’s quite the ladies man
Elon’s impressive roster of romances after divorcing his first wife – Canadian
novelist Justine – includes none other than Johnny Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard. He also
married British actress Talulah Riley – who you may remember from such Brit
flicks as Pride and Prejudice and The Boat That Rocked – not once but twice,
both times sadly ending in divorce. He was also linked with gorgeous actress
Cameron Diaz, before hooking up with current squeeze, Canadian musician Grimes. Grimes and
Musk fell for each other after both making the same incomprehensibly nerdy joke on Twitter.
In college he ran a nightclub
To earn a little extra cash as a student,
Elon and a friend rented a ten-bedroom frat house, covered the windows with trash bags,
and at times he had his mom on the payroll to work the door for some epic parties.
Clean-living Elon rarely got smashed, preferring to watch the cover charges roll in..
His mom is a model
Pretty Maye Musk has graced the cover of Vogue,
and aged 69 won a lucrative makeup contract with cosmetics giant CoverGirl. The brainy
beauty also holds two Master’s degrees in Nutritional Science and Dietetics.
He has released his own music
In 2019 Elon released a rap tune called ‘RIP Harambe’ under the pseudonym ‘Emo G Records’,
with Yung Jake on vocals. In 2020 he went one further, writing and singing on EDM
banger ‘Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe.’ Are the tunes any good? Noted music critic Alexis Petridis
dismissed ‘Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe’ as ‘competent but enthralling’ and ‘the kind of atmospheric,
inoffensive music that might play in the background at the launch of a new car.’
He has six children
You’ll have heard all about his and Grimes little nipper X Æ A-Xii [X-ASH-A-TWELVE].
What’s less well known is Elon fathered both twins AND triplets with his ex-wife Justine.
Griffin and Xavier Musk were born 2004, Kai, Saxon and Damian followed in 2006.
In 2014, dissatisfied with the education his boys were receiving,
Musk went so far as to open his own private school exclusively for his kids, and the
offspring of select SpaceX employees. “It’s quite like a little schoolhouse on the prairie”,
Musk has said of the ongoing school project. “Except it’s in Bel-Air, on a golf course.”
He dropped out of Stanford after just two days
After earning two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania
Elon headed west to California for a PhD at Stanford. Sensing the coming internet gold rush,
he dropped out after just 2 days to start his first company, Zip2,
which he later sold to Compaq for $307 million. So that worked out well
He coded and released a video game aged just 12
In 1984, the young entrepreneur coded a simple space shoot-em-up on his humble
Commodore VIC-20. Best of all, he sold the code for his primitive game – named
‘Blastar’ – to a South African computer magazine for a very respectable $500.
Three years later, aged 15, Musk made detailed plans to open a video
game arcade with his brother and cousin. The plans were apparently
being seriously considered by the local zoning authorities,
before Elon’s parents found out about his little money-making scheme and put a stop to it.
He crashed his $1million McLaren F1
New-minted millionaire Musk was giving a ride to his business partner Peter Thiel in 2000.
To show off his fancy new wheels he uttered the immortal words ‘watch this’… and promptly crashed
the uninsured million dollar supercar. The pair were forced to hitchhike to their meeting. Oops.
He tried buying rockets from Russia
In 2001 Elon attempted to buy three ex-Soviet Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles to launch
his pet project space programme. The Russians reneged on their promises,
mocked him and called Musk a ‘little boy’. Probably a mistake, in hindsight.
On the flight home from that meeting,
Musk – $100m richer from the PayPal sale – furiously made plans to build his own rockets,
and the very next year – 2002 – founded what would go on to be known as SpaceX.
He’s deeply concerned about the rise of AI
After chatting about Artificial Intelligence with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon says the Facebook chief’s
‘…understanding of the subject is limited.’ Ouch. In order to help out in the fight against
our coming robot overlords, Elon has invested heavily in organisations dedicated to establishing
meaningful regulation of AI, hoping he can save humanity from itself. One such investment is
in OpenAI, a non-profit hoping to stop mankind murdering itself with artificial intelligence.
In 2016 he also established Neuralink, a firm which hopes to implant devices
into our brains and expand our biological bandwidth and keep up with the machines.
He recently he moved to a 50k home
Despite being the on-off richest man alive, with a net worth somewhere around $160bn,
Elon makes it a point of pride to own as few material possessions as possible.
As such he’s been selling much of his enviable property portfolio, and reportedly now resides
in a modest $50k prefab home in Boca Chica, near his growing Starbase rocket building facility.
Even more amazingly, he doesn’t even own the house, instead preferring to rent it from
the company. Well, we all know it’s tough getting on the property ladder these days.
What do you think? Have we missed any major aspects of Musk’s mad lifestyle?
Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to subscribe for more musk-see tech content.