At Home With Elon Musk: The (Soon-to-Be) Bachelor Billionaire

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At Home With Elon Musk: The (Soon-to-Be) Bachelor Billionaire

Forbes Life Elon Musksee photos

Robert Trachetenberg

Click for full photo gallery: Forbes Life Elon Musk

This story appears in the April issue of ForbesLife magazine.

It's Thursday morning in Bel Air, California, and Elon Musk, his cheeks still wet with aftershave, has retreated to the basement theater of his 20,000-square-foot French Nouveau mansion, which he's converted into a man cave suitable for business or play.

The leather couch and coffee table inscribed with the periodic table serve as a de facto workstation, a retreat for the e-mails he shoots out past midnight and his research on such things as the Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, the "best heat shield known to man." But rather than trudge to the office when the rest of the world is awake, the 40-year-old billionaire founder of electric carmaker Tesla and SpaceX, the first private company to put a vehicle into orbit, is teaching me how to play BioShock, an Ayn Rand–esque first-person shooter epic.

"It talks about Hegelian dialectics being the things that determine the course of history," Musk explains, his eyes  fixed on the screen. "They're sort of competing philosophies or competing meme sets, and you can look at modern history where it's not so much genetics going into battle as a battle of meme structures."

Yes, he talks like that. While he's playing video games.

The games go on for 90 minutes. While work for both of his companies beckons—Tesla was readying the debut of an SUV aimed at eco-conscious soccer moms and plans to launch a new sedan in July; SpaceX, meanwhile, was testing its Dragon spacecraft for a docking with the International Space Station—Musk clearly relished the distraction, carving out still more time for a tour of the house.

Situated atop a hidden hill that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, the 1.6-acre grounds boast a tennis court (Musk's brother, Kimbal, jokes that their infrequent matches get so competitive that he needs to run away after making a winning shot), an outdoor pool, and a footpath leading to a giant tree upon which Musk, the father of 7-year-old twins and 5-year-old triplets, all boys, plans to build a tree fort. The inside is just as grand, with all the expected billionaire trappings, down to the cavernous wine cellar and the master bathroom so big Musk put a treadmill in it.

What was missing from all of this, though, was any sign of actual people. The white shelves in a towering library stand embarrassingly bare. (Musk devours books exclusively on his iPhone, most recently The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs.)

The pool is covered, the manicured backyard devoid of toys, lawn chairs, or a grill. The boys are at school—Musk, having been through a much-publicized divorce, shares custody of his sons with his college sweetheart, Justine. His second wife, Talulah Riley, a 26-year-old British actress, is, I'm told, back in her home country filming a movie. There is no evidence—clothes, shoes, makeup—of a female inhabitant. There aren't even any personal photographs to speak of, save a 3-foot panoramic shot of Musk and Riley watching an eclipse in front of a private yacht on some remote tropical beach, his arms wrapped around her as they both gaze skyward, laughing. On another wall, a photo of a chair seems to be the placeholder that came with the frame.

I ask Musk if he has a dog. Yes, he says, two. But no dish, leashes, or chew toys are in sight. The house, he tells me, is leased. So is the furniture. Although Musk lives here, in other words, it would be an exaggeration to call this his home. For now, it's a way station, the perfect place to play dystopian video games.

At 6-foot-1, with broad shoulders and legs that match his first name (Elon is Hebrew for "oak tree," although Musk's family comes from Pennsylvania Dutch stock, not Jewish), he fills out the burgundy Tesla Roadster—which he chose over his Audi Q7 and Porsche 911—for the 20-mile drive to the Hawthorne-based headquarters of SpaceX. Pulling onto the 405, he attentively configures the optimum temperature and wind levels for the convertible; programs a mix of Robbie Williams, Adele, and Beethoven's Fifth; and drives fast and clinically. It's all done in a manner that reflects his public perception as a robotic genius—the real-life inspiration for the Tony Stark character in Jon Favreau's Iron Man.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahellio ... llionaire/

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