As a baby-faced tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, Elon Musk devoured the science-fiction novels of Iain M Banks. He would later name two rocket launchers after Banks’s self-aware spaceships. Yet Musk himself appears to be entirely without self-awareness: how could he inhale the sci-fi of a self-proclaimed ardent socialist like Banks and take so little of the message away?
Banks isn’t mentioned in The Elon Musk Show (BBC Two, Wednesday, 9pm), a thorough and absorbing portrait of the Tesla chief executive. But the first of three episodes nonetheless paints Musk, the world’s richest man, as a soul untroubled by doubt and electrified by a sense of manifest destiny. As with many “visionaries” of the dotcom era — one thinks of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, too — he also gives the impression of being a bit of a weirdo.
“He seemed quite shy. He asked, ‘May I put my hand on your knee?’” recalls Musk’s second wife, Talulah Riley — swept off her feet as Musk clamped a paw on that knee. (They would go on to marry and divorce twice.)
That sheepish streak came with a chill. “He works in mysterious ways,” says one software engineer who sounds both intoxicated and traumatised by his time toiling alongside Musk. “He tends to stare. He can be very intimidating,” says another.
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Musk has been in the news again recently after attempting to buy Twitter and then apparently backing out of the deal, only to finally go all in again. Part one of The Elon Musk Show focuses on his formative years in the tech industry. It takes in his role as a founder of PayPal and his struggles with his space-exploration company, SpaceX, and with Tesla, which, after some initial stuttering, has gone on to make a mint flogging high-spec ecars.
The difficulty confronting the film-makers is that Musk comes across — by crash or design — as fundamentally unknowable. There’s a vague quality to his personality: he doesn’t enjoy the spotlight, and in interviews he is opaque and not quite present, like a “Force Ghost” from Star Wars. The Elon Musk Show, for that reason, struggles to sink its claws into its subject matter. He is half-man, half — vaporous ambition.
But it is still a fascinating story, and you can sense the PTSD flicker across the faces of colleagues who tried to keep up with Musk’s punishing work schedule. “When you’re spending time with him you’re getting a very small part of him,” says his first wife, Justine, in an archive interview. “Ninety-five per cent of his mental energy is being consumed by other things.”
Musk ultimately emerges as neither personable nor grotesque. (That said, he is certainly capable of cruelty and spite.) Instead, he is a very odd fish swimming in the rarefied waters of Lake Tech Bro. With Tesla he may yet change the world — and he could likewise do so if his Twitter acquisition goes ahead. (He’ll give Donald Trump back his account, for one thing.)
The takeaways from The Elon Musk Show are that the most influential entrepreneur of his age is cut from deeply esoteric cloth and that whatever gentler qualities he possesses have been thoroughly eclipsed by drive and ruthlessness.
He’s almost like a character from a science-fiction novel (though not one of the wise ones by Iain M Banks). The film explains in meticulous, compelling terms why he is so widely admired: he has, after all, revolutionised several industries at once. It also confirms that you probably wouldn’t want to work for him.
