Maureen Down, Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss, NYTimes, July 25, 2020:
So how do the King of Mars, his Galactic Princess and their newborn son, X Æ A-Xii, spend a Saturday night holed up in their Los Angeles pad?
A little anime — lately it’s been “Death Note” and “Evangelion.” Lots of late-night debates about the potential and danger of artificial intelligence. And many audiobooks and podcasts, particularly ones about history.
“Right now, we’re going back to Genghis Khan for like the third time, and the Mongols, I guess,” said the Galactic Princess, otherwise known as Grimes, otherwise known as Claire Boucher, otherwise known as “c,” her initial and the symbol for the speed of light.
“You seem to be obsessed with that,” she teased her boyfriend about Genghis Khan.
Grimes, the singer and artist, and Elon Musk, the rocket man and Tesla magnate, have an otherworldly romance. Which works out well since Mr. Musk wants to occupy Mars, in case malevolent robots or an engineered virus threaten Earth, and then die on Mars, just not on impact.
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The couple has a baby with the most unusual name, which they shorten to “X.” Mr. Musk said it’s pronounced “just like the letter X. AE is pronounced ‘ash’, as in Old English. A-12 is also pronounced just like it reads. Refers to the Archangel-12 C.I.A. reconnaissance plane.”
3's a crowd:
About the contention that he had a threesome with Ms. Heard and her friend Cara Delevingne, Mr. Musk said, laughing, “We did not have the threesome, you know. So I think people think these things are generally more salacious than they are.”
He has some advice for Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard: “For the two of them, I would just recommend that they bury the hatchet and move on.”
Asked about Mr. Depp’s deprecation of him as “Mollusk," Mr. Musk chuckled again, saying: “Well, yeah, I hope he recovers from this situation.”
Everybody poops:
But how does he have any time to spend with his children, given his insane work schedule?
“Well, babies are just eating and pooping machines, you know?” he said. “Right now there’s not much I can do. Grimes has a much bigger role than me right now. When the kid gets older, there will be more of a role for me. I think just doing what I’ve done with my other kids. If I have a trip for Tesla to China, for example, I’ll bring the kids with me and we’ll go see the Great Wall or we took the bullet train from Beijing to Xian and saw the Terracotta Warriors.” He created an online school for his older kids, which he said has “actually worked out pretty well.”
I asked Mr. Musk, who has given money to both Democratic and Republican candidates, if Grimes, who supported Bernie Sanders, had an influence on his recent decision to disencumber himself of his houses, including a quirky one once owned by Gene Wilder.
“Well," he said, “she thinks I should hold on to at least one house.”
SpaceX:
And with SpaceX, Mr. Musk provided a moment so bold and brimming with American razzmatazz that it lifted us briefly out of our pandemic-induced funk. When his Crew Dragon spacecraft launched two NASA astronauts in May from the legendary Florida pad that once served Apollo missions, it was a reminder of when America was first and fast and made things, coming at a dark time when even masks and ventilators seemed beyond our manufacturing reach and when our government appears so incapable of getting coronavirus under control that the European Union has banned Americans from coming in.
AI:
In the past, talking about A.I. turning on us, he has used the Monty Python line, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”
“My assessment about why A.I. is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are,” he told me. “And this is hubris and obviously false.”
He adds that working with A.I. at Tesla lets him say with confidence “that we’re headed toward a situation where A.I. is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.”
He said his “top concern” is DeepMind, the secretive London A.I. lab run by Demis Hassabis and owned by Google. “Just the nature of the A.I. that they’re building is one that crushes all humans at all games,” he said. “I mean, it’s basically the plotline in ‘War Games.’”
He wears a mask:
For many of the coastal elites for whom a Tesla is a status symbol, Mr. Musk’s laissez-faire approach to the pandemic was disappointing, and sounded way too Trumpian. In the spring, when his California factory was shut down, he called stay-at-home orders “fascist” and tweeted, “FREE AMERICA NOW.”
“I think the reality of Covid is that it is dangerous if you’re elderly and have pre-existing conditions,” he said, adding: “It absolutely makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re vulnerable, but I do not think it makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re not vulnerable.” He said he may have had Covid in January and he wears a mask on the factory floor.
The Tesla-loving liberals were horrified again by a May tweet, “Take the red pill," an allusion to the pill Keanu Reeves takes in “The Matrix” that lets him see the truth.
About Kanye:
“I’ve done my best to convince him that 2024 would be better than 2020,” Mr. Musk said, so that Mr. West wouldn’t be accused of splitting the Black vote with Mr. Biden.
Well, the man has SOME taste:
Princess Mononoke is the best Hayao Miyazaki movie.
Yes, agreed.
“i ❤anime” is your most popular tweet.
It’s definitely one of them. I think for a long time the most popular tweet was that I’m going to buy Fortnite and delete it to save these kids from eternal virginity.
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