Elon Musk's Tragic Real-Life Story

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk is a titan of the tech industry. Enterprises such as Tesla and SpaceX alone are more than enough to justify people calling him a real-life Iron Man. Musk is a guy who can and absolutely will do almost anything. He freely talks about his plans to colonize Mars. He sent an electric car roaming through space. His Boring Company once sold a consumer model flamethrower called "Not a Flamethrower," because why not?

But where does a man like Elon Musk come from? What makes his ideas machine tick? What are the deep, dark secrets that keep him awake at night? He didn't just pop into existence, head full of ideas and a happy smile on his face. Despite the billions in his bank account and a string of amazing inventions under his belt, Musk's personal life has been full of tragedy and misfortune. Here's the story of the real Elon Musk — the man behind the myth. 

At some point in their lives, most children go through a period where their relationship with their parents is a little strained. In Elon Musk's case, this rift is serious and caused by more than just minor teenage disagreements. In a biography published in 2015, Musk called his father, Errol Musk, "an odd duck," and had this to say about his childhood: "It would certainly be accurate to say that I did not have a good childhood. ... It may sound good. It was not absent of good, but it was not a happy childhood. It was like misery." He seems to attribute quite a lot of this misery to Errol. In an interview he gave in 2017, Musk called his father a "terrible human being" who had a tendency to make evil plans and who has committed almost every crime you can imagine. He didn't go into further detail except to say that when he was very young, his father was physically abusive.

Errol Musk has mostly been unaffected by the negative publicity. According to the New Zealand Herald, he feels that his son's accusations are the actions of a spoiled child. He also says that a number of the stories Musk likes to tell about him are patently untrue, and suspects his son's comments about him are motivated by a fragile emotional state ... and possibly, a lingering bitterness over the way Errol failed to love the USA like his son did.

In 2010, Elon Musk found himself in a very peculiar pickle: He ran out of money. Yes, seriously. As described by the New York Times, the industrial tycoon who only recently had $200 million of hard cash at his disposal was forced to admit that he had managed to completely empty his bank account. In fact, the circumstances had forced him to live off loans from his friends for as long as four months. Musk revealed this surprising predicament during his divorce proceedings with Justine Musk, who was asking for a house, child support, alimony, and $6 million in cash.

Of course, the man is a billionaire today, so this was just a temporary issue. Musk was never broke in the "everything I own is gone" kind of way. Instead, this was a period in his life where his finances were all tied up in assets, leaving him extremely rich in resources but flat broke when it came to actual dollars in his pocket.

As a high-ranking member of the Silicon Valley pantheon, Elon Musk has been the subject of many rumors linking him with the decadent lifestyle of the rich and famous. Musk smoked marijuana on Joe Rogan's podcast and, rather more controversially, rapper Azealia Banks accused him and girlfriend Grimes of leaving her stranded in Musk's house for "days." Banks insinuated that during her stay Musk was on acid, and she speculated that the two were looking for some kinky bedroom antics.

Although Musk denies knowing Banks personally, she's not the only one who has connected the billionaire with a lifestyle of debauchery. In 2018, Vanity Fair released an excerpt of Emily Chang's book Brotopia, about the excesses of Silicon Valley power players. The piece described the nasty details of a typical Technocrati theme party, with copious drugs and adult hookups. The excerpt prompted an entrepreneur called Paul Biggar to write a blog post revealing Musk attended the party. According to the Cut, Chang confirms this in her book and reveals that Musk was wearing an armor-themed costume with spikes and chains.

A spokesperson to Musk confirmed he had indeed been there for a couple hours but insisted that Musk never realized he was in the middle of a sex party. Instead, he thought that it was just a corporate costume party. How you confuse those two things is anyone's guess.

There's no question that Elon Musk promises much, works hard, and sets his ambitions sky high. According to the Guardian, his tendency to set ambitious goals is not always a good thing because meeting those goals is extremely difficult, and the stress of accomplishing the task falls on the shoulders of his workers. Musk's optimistic promises of Tesla production and availability mean his factory workers operate under a constant rush. This, in turn, means that injuries happen and safety measures sometimes fail. 

In 2017, Tesla and Musk were in hot water because a number of factory workers had suffered life-changing injuries. Musk managed to turn this into a PR victory by promising that he'd personally meet every injured person and attempt to understand how to make the process safer by going down the production line and personally performing the same tasks they do. However, a number of workers who have been injured since this bold promise say that they've never had that personal meeting with Musk, let alone seen him perform their tasks. 

Meanwhile, the constant stress, the pressure to meet demands, and the difficulty of the work has made the Tesla factory an ideal environment for work-related injury. One Tesla worker even says that the main export of the company is injuries, not cars. Additional reporting shows Tesla even left injuries off its books to make the factories appear safer than they were.

Elon Musk is a man whose work-life balance tends to skew heavily toward work. According to the Guardian, the crunch period of Tesla's Model 3 production schedule saw Musk routinely work 120-hour weeks, popping Ambien pills to wind himself down on the rare occasion he actually made it home instead of spending the night at the factory. Musk's notorious efficiency and hardcore work ethic has often been celebrated by the press, but in August 2018, he showed that there's a downside to being constantly in work mode. In an emotional interview with the New York Times, the usually assertive Musk revealed how much his killer schedule has affected him. He almost missed his brother's wedding, and spent his own birthday holed up in the Tesla factory. During the busiest stretches he had no time to see his friends, who were concerned about his well-being. 

The fact that Musk sometimes cools down with Ambien sedatives after his grueling work days has added an extra element of concern for his business associates. The drug doesn't always help him sleep as it should. Instead, Tesla board members have suspected that it is the real reason behind his occasional strange Twitter tirades.

In 2002, Elon Musk and his first wife, Justine, went through a tragedy that no couple should ever endure. As described by Esquire, their first child was a boy called Nevada Alexander. He stopped breathing in his crib when he was only ten weeks old, and died in his mother's arms after they decided to take him off life support. According to Justine, Musk found it very difficult to face this kind of loss, so he dealt with the situation by ... not dealing with it. Instead of facing his emotions, the man who builds rockets adapted a different coping mechanism: a no-nonsense mentality that ignored the dark, painful things and kept the show going. 

Unfortunately, the future held further difficulties for the couple. Although Musk and Justine had twins in 2004 and triplets in 2006 with the help of fertility treatments, they wouldn't stay together for long. In 2008, Justine told Musk how unhappy she was. After a short period of counseling, Musk demanded that Justine accept their marriage with no changes, and when she couldn't, he immediately filed for divorce. Just six weeks later, he got engaged to British actress Talulah Riley.