I first interviewed Elon Musk in 2008, when I still had to explain who he was to my editors, and long before he became the second most controversial American. We met a couple of times each year for interviews until 2015, and I tried to summarise the oddness of those encounters in a recent piece for The Intercooler.
And once, talking to him on the phone as he lay in bed in Bel Air on a Saturday morning, he told me that the clattering I could hear in the background was his fiancee, the British actress Talulah Riley, making breakfast. At the time, he was still married to the writer Justine Musk, mother of his five boys (twins and triplets, for greater efficiency) and nobody knew that the marriage was in trouble. I was on deadline for the Mail on Sunday and had to get his response to my piece on the battle he'd had with Tesla's original founders. I couldn't afford to use the time he'd allotted me to pursue the details of his personal life, but when we hung up I called his then-PR guy (they never last long) to ask if he'd really left his wife for the 22 year-old St. Trinians actress, or if he was trying to lead me into printing something he could sue me for. "No," explained the weary-sounding flack. "He really has left Justine. Maybe he's chosen you to break the news.
