Elon Musk is the richest person in the world – he’s got about $219bn, give or take, and is rarely out of the headlines. But that doesn’t make him the most interesting person in the world, or worthy of such a lavish attempt to find out what makes him the Musk he is in The Elon Musk Show (BBC Two). His main achievement in life, though unheralded, is actually to prove that, just as money can’t buy you love, happiness or good looks, so it can’t make you inherently more fascinating than God or how nature fashioned you.
This is the central flaw in the BBC’s overly deferential series. The programme-makers seem to have got a bit mixed up between Musk’s cosmic ambitions and material achievements on the one hand, and his not-so-magnetic personality on the other. The tales about how he successively built PayPal, Tesla and his tourism outfit SpaceX are indeed awesome, at least in scale. The lad himself? More prosaic.
There is a mismatch here. In the right hands, the stark contrast between the humdrum bloke and his unimaginable wealth could be developed as quite amusing. It’s true that we see him working hard, expecting others to do the same, nearly going bust and taking huge risks – but lots of entrepreneurs, large and small, do precisely that. It doesn’t mean you’d want to spend an evening with them, either on TV or in real life for that matter. There’s a misguided sense, therefore, in this three-episode biography that if we could be more like Musk – ape him even – we’d be as rich as him.
It’s a silly idea, and anyway, even if it were sort of true, there’s no need to worship him. That said, The Elon Musk Show is extremely well-made. The mix of archive footage and fresh interviews, still photography and classical music is beautifully and painstakingly blended together with real care and craft. The programme-makers must have spent many a long day and night in the edit suite, welding this lot together like one of Musk’s spaceships. In fact, such is the attention to detail, it’s worthy of Musk himself.
The boy is unusual though. His second wife, Talulah Riley, for example, tells of how, early in their relationship, he asked if he could place his hand on her leg, which demonstrates either an extreme sense of chivalry or a heightened sense of the legal consequences of unwanted attention.
Later on in their courtship, after a dinner date, he offered to take her back to his hotel room, with some implausible proposal that they could watch rocket movies together. It turned out it wasn’t some sort of figurative euphemism and the lovebirds did indeed do that. Probably wisely, the interviewer doesn’t ask Riley: “What first attracted you to the billionaire Elon Musk?” It would have been a laugh, though.
While there is no sign of Musk’s father, Errol, or Musk himself in the show, Musk’s mother, Maye, is interesting. Dressed as expensively as you’d expect for a centibillionaire’s mam, in rich mauves and purples, she has a steely but mischievous demeanour that makes her resemble a more fun version of Cruella de Vil. Maye describes how her “genius” son, aged three, would insist on taking her on in reasoned, logical arguments, rather than just throw tantrums. The infant Elon would stay up all night reading science fiction and went to sleep just as Maye got up. Perhaps, as his staff would find out later, he expected her to keep the same crazy hours as he always did. She’s not complaining, though.
Yet when we hear him speak, watch him wandering around the office in his regulation Silicon Valley khaki slacks, see him celebrating the eventual successful launch of his space rocket, teasing his kids, whizzing around in his sports cars, and welling up about landmark, earth-changing achievements, we see a rather normal man. His emotions are conventional, his language normal, his looks and manner, if anything, are rather bland and nondescript. He’s had a few wives and girlfriends, but there are many men like this on the minimum wage. Maybe there’s a “real” Musk that is continually zany and uttering bewildering remarks, like David Bowie or Donald Trump, but Musk is almost reassuringly dull.
I say almost because the exception to his ordinariness is his sometimes strange political views. He’s spouted off about everything from Covid to Taiwan, not always making sense, and he now wants to control Twitter. If that happens the Elon Musk “show” really will get interesting. But he probably won’t.
