Grimes attended the Met Ball on Monday with a mystery man on her arm—someone who doesn’t hail from the artistic and musical circles she occupies. Oddly, the multi-talented singer has chosen to pair up with a South African–born businessman named Elon Musk. So who is he? Don’t worry, I’ve got all your answers below:
He’s super rich
Musk is the co-founder and CEO of Tesla, a company that makes expensive electric cars, and SpaceX, which launches rockets or something. He cofounded X.com, which eventually merged with another company founded by Peter Thiel—the tech billionaire who was super into Donald Trump during the election and funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker—to form PayPal. He also founded a company that digs holes, appropriately named the Boring Company.
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He has five kids with his first wife, Justine Musk
Musk has been married multiple times, and had relationships with several high-profile stars. (More on that in a moment!) He married his first wife, writer Justine Musk (née Wilson), in 2000. Their first son, Nevada Alexander, died of sudden infant death syndrome at ten weeks old in 2002. Over the next five years, the couple had twin sons and then triplet sons. The marriage fell apart in 2008, after years of tension, which Justine described in a 2010 essay published by Marie Claire. The piece, excerpted below, paints a portrait of what it’s like to be in a relationship with the Tesla and SpaceX co-founder:
“I am your wife,” I told him repeatedly, “not your employee.”
“If you were my employee,” he said just as often, “I would fire you.”
Things got worse after that:
Elon agreed to enter counseling, but he was running two companies and carrying a planet of stress. One month and three sessions later, he gave me an ultimatum: Either we fix this marriage today or I will divorce you tomorrow, by which I understood he meant, Our status quo works for me, so it should work for you. He filed for divorce the next morning. I felt numb, but strangely relieved.
Justine and Elon share custody of their five sons.
Elon also publicly weighed in on his relationship with Justine during their messy divorce. “Since I was accused of absconding with an actress in one of the biggest newspapers in the world,” Elon wrote on Business Insider, “this was assumed by many to be true. Let me be absolutely clear: it is not. I filed for divorce from Justine (for reasons I should not have to justify or make public) before I met Talulah Riley, the woman who is now my fiancé.”
He married and divorced actress Talulah Riley, twice
Six weeks after filing for divorce from Justine Musk, Elon texted his ex to tell her he was engaged to Riley. “Throughout the divorce proceedings, his fiancée and I discovered we liked each other,” Justine wrote of the actress.
Elon Musk married Riley in 2010. They divorced in 2012. They remarried in 2014. They redivorced in 2016.
“Marriage is a social construct, but I still believe in it. Elon and I are best friends,” Riley told the Daily Mail in the midst of their second divorce. “We still see each other all the time and take care of each other. If this could continue indefinitely it would be lovely. When you’ve been with someone for eight years on and off, you really learn how to love them. He and I are very good at loving each other.”
He used to date Amber Heard
The actress!
“I just broke up with my girlfriend,” he told Rolling Stone in 2017. “I was really in love, and it hurt bad. Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think.”
After his breakup with Heard, he said, “I’m looking for a long-term relationship. I’m not looking for a one-night stand. I’m looking for a serious companion or soulmate”
“If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy,” Musk told Rolling Stone. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.”
His dad, Errol Musk, seems like a nightmare
In the same interview with Rolling Stone, Musk also talked about the emotional abuse he suffered at the hands of his father during his childhood. “He was such a terrible human being,” Elon said. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil. He will plan evil.”
In March 2018, it was reported that Errol Musk fathered a child with Jana Bezuidenhout, his stepdaughter from his second marriage, who he had raised from age four. “It happened one evening when Jana’s boyfriend threw her out of the house and she had slept over at my house,” he told a South African newspaper. “You have to understand—I’ve been single for 20 years and I’m just a man who makes mistakes.”
Elon is estranged from his toxic father, thank god.
He doesn’t like unions!
Elon’s company, Tesla, has had a fair amount of public strife with its factory workers, who accuse the company of being anti-union. “Every time we go out there and try to hand out [union] flyers, security comes and talks to us for 20 to 30 minutes, takes our badges, makes sure we’re employees of the factory,” one worker told the Daily Beast last year. “Sometimes people from HR come, and they don’t hold back on their opinions on the matter.”
The injury rates at his car factories are higher than average
In 2017, a study from a worker’s advocacy group found “injury rates at [Tesla]’s Fremont manufacturing facility were higher than the industry average in 2014 and 2015… [and] calls into question Tesla’s claim that injury rates have fallen between 2016 and 2017.”
(This kind of thing is why workers want a union in the first place.)
He has the best hair implants (maybe?) I have ever seen
While I don’t have confirmation that Musk uses hair plugs, how do you explain this?
He identifies as “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”
“I’m somewhere in the middle, socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” Musk reportedly said of his politics in 2011.
He’s starting his own humor website!
In 2017, Musk poached several staffers from the satirical news site the Onion to start his own comedic media company, which he is maybe calling “Thud!” Musk reportedly considered buying the Onion outright in 2014.
“In order to understand the essential truth of things,” he told Rolling Stone, “I think you can find it in the Onion and occasionally on Reddit.”
He’s an active Twitter user
The only woman he currently follows is his new love, Grimes. Here are some of his tweets:
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