Dinner with Elon Musk: Revealing the ‘real person’ of the richest billionaire on the planet, the ‘disruptor’ on Twitter, the greatest businessman in history

Financial Times reporter Roula Khalaf recently had a special conversation with Elon Musk. The combined dinner conversation, which lasted for more than an hour, revealed more about the richest person on the planet. Below is a summary of the translation.

Dinner with Elon Musk starts with driving a Tesla. I sat in the back, next to X, the billionaire’s two-and-a-half son. It’s around 7 p.m. in Austin and X is getting pretty cranky. We departed for Fonda San Miguel, Musk’s favorite Mexican restaurant, after a visit to the Tesla Gigafactory.

At this huge factory, Musk is producing Y electric SUVs, the latest model in Tesla’s collection – the company that puts him at the top of the list of the richest people in the world (net worth : 232 billion USD). Musk carried X on his shoulder while proudly showing off the factory premises.

As soon as he arrived at the restaurant, Musk’s security director – also his driver came to the rescue with a bottle of milk to help X sleep. Over the next few hours, I will get to know Elon Musk’s curious personality better: An engineer, visionary, billionaire, unruly, agitator, and troublemaker.

Despite skeptics, myself included, Musk built Tesla into a company with a market capitalization of more than $700 billion and forced the car industry to accelerate its shift to electric vehicles. Far from being modest, Musk estimates that he may have pushed the “birth of sustainable energy” by “10, maybe even 20 years.”

In just over a decade, he has also transformed the commercial space industry and space economics, racing ahead of rivals to build a reusable rocket that can carry passengers. Nasa has chosen SpaceX’s Starship to send astronauts to the moon in the next few years. SpaceX is currently worth about $125 billion. One day, Musk is convinced, he can settle on Mars.

Musk is also a person who does not follow any rules or regulations. He constantly tweets to his more than 100 million followers, reveling in outrageous outbursts, fighting with regulators and employees, and mocking competitors.

He regularly faces the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): Musk was fined and forced to resign as Tesla chairman due to tweets in 2018 in which he claimed to have secured the capital to make Tesla a success. Private company. These statements were later described by a US judge as having been made “recklessly”. A recent lawsuit accuses Musk of running a multilevel scheme to support dogecoin, a digital currency.

Why would a serious man with serious ideas indulge in silly Twitter games that could also cost his followers dearly? ” Don’t you find it entertaining ?” Musk laughed. “ I do all sorts of stupid things on Twitter, often shooting myself in the foot and causing all sorts of trouble for myself… I don’t know, I just wanted to find a way to express myself on Twitter. It’s a way to get the message across to the masses .”

To be fair, Musk was so obsessed with Twitter that he got caught up in a massive acquisition of the platform that sent Wall Street and the tech industry up and running for months. Twitter sued Musk (and he sued back) after he pulled out of a $44 billion buyout deal signed in April. This week, Musk changed his mind. Now he says he wants to buy Twitter.

I asked over dinner if his initial offer was a bad joke. “ Twitter is definitely an invitation to increase your pain level ,” he said.

But he makes no secret that his interest in the company has never been primarily financial: “ I didn’t buy Twitter for the money. It’s not like I’m trying to buy some yacht and can’t afford it. I don’t own any boats. But I think it’s important for everyone to have a means of exchanging ideas that is as trustworthy and comprehensive as possible, and that it be as trustworthy and transparent as possible .”

Musk didn’t eat lunch, possibly because an unflattering photo of himself in a swimsuit taken on a yacht in Mykonos went viral over the summer. Since then, he… on a diet. At Fonda San Miguel, a brimming Mexican restaurant that promises a regional dining experience, he is a regular dinner customer. He ordered a cold margarita and I ordered a beer.

Musk looked around. “ There are some interesting things about this restaurant, ” he said appreciatively, and suggested to the waiter that they serve us some of their specialties. Musk is telling me that companies are like babies when the first dishes hit the table: Lamb chops with pepper sauce, shrimp with cheese and jalapeños. The food is “epic,” gasps Musk.

Musk is capricious, but he considers himself a problem solver, and the problem is everything from the possibility of an end to life on Earth to climate change and even transportation (Boring’s company). he is building tunnels). Lately, he has been dreaming of a (rather futile) peace plan of his own to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Born and raised in South Africa to a well-to-do family, he moved to California after studying economics and physics in Canada and Pennsylvania. One of his first big ideas was ahead of its time: He wanted to revolutionize banking. He merged an online payments business he co-founded with another company to become PayPal. When PayPal was sold to eBay, he used the money to found SpaceX and invest in Tesla.

Aging seems to be the only threat to humans he’s not trying to tackle, though another company he founded, Neuralink, is designing chips that will be implanted in the brain for recovery. sensory and motor functions. Musk is very concerned about population decline and has vowed to help solve this problem by having 10 children (from different “partners”), including twins with an executive at… Neuralink.

Musk quipped when I asked him if he had any other children: ” I’m pretty sure there aren’t any other babies ” — and he also dismissed rumors that he bought a fertility clinic to assist. giving birth to her own child. Some friends, he revealed, have actually suggested he should have 500 kids, but that would be a bit “strange”.

Referring to himself, at the age of 51, he said he could have had more children, but just wanted to be to the extent that he could be a good father to them. But he says aging should not be tackled. ” It’s important that people die .”

Musk’s bigger concern is the preservation of life beyond Earth. His solution was to populate Mars. “ Something will happen to the Earth eventually, it’s only a matter of time. Eventually, the sun will expand and destroy all life on Earth, so we need to move away at some point, ” he said. “ The question is, what percentage of our resources should we devote to such an effort? I think if you say 1% resources, that’s probably a fair amount .”

Will Musk himself join the pioneering colony on Mars? “Especially if I get older, I’ll do it. Why not?” he said.

Regarding statements and actions that are said to be “a disregard for the law “, Musk said that ” it is completely meaningless “: ” I actually follow a million laws and regulations and I follow almost 99, 99% of them. It’s only when I think that the law is against everyone’s interests that I have a problem .”

There were some topics that interested Musk, prompting prolonged bursts of laughter, but there were also other questions that were answered with silence. The longest silence came after my question about China and the risk to the Tesla factory in Shanghai, which produces between 30% and 50% of Tesla’s total output. Musk is an admirer as well as an investor in China. But he is not immune to growing US-China tensions.

We have more than an hour to go to dinner and Musk is in a hurry, scheduling a meeting with the staff at SpaceX. We returned to the car that was taking him to the private airport to board the jet, and Musk offered to continue the conversation along the way.

I saw X exactly where I had seen it before, in the boy’s car seat. But now, X is happier after taking a nap. The boy was watching a rocket video on his iPad while the billionaire dad discussed the rocket with the staff.

Suddenly, I noticed that the Tesla car was driving itself, as if to dispel the doubts I had expressed about Tesla’s self-driving prospects. ” It can get to the airport without interference ,” Musk said. Having been warned earlier, I turned to fasten my seat belt. Musk may be a magician, but he can also be wrong.

Source: Financial Times