Dinner with Elon Musk begins with a drive in a Tesla. I am seated in the back, next to X, the billionaire’s two-and-a-half-year-old son. It’s around 7pm in Austin, and X is, as one would expect, cranky. We had set off to Fonda San Miguel, Musk’s favourite Mexican restaurant, after a visit with an FT colleague to the Tesla Gigafactory on the banks of the Colorado river. In this massive site Musk is producing the Y electric SUVs, the latest model in the Tesla collection that has catapulted him to the top of the world’s rich list (net worth: $232bn). Musk, with X perched on his shoulders, had proudly shown off the factory floor as he periodically raged against sluggish investment in lithium refining, which is desperately needed to ease battery shortages around the world.
Musk’s security chief, the designated driver, comes to the rescue with a milk bottle that soothes X to sleep by the time we reach the restaurant. For the next couple of hours, I am better acquainted with the curious character of Elon Musk, the engineer and the visionary, the billionaire and the disrupter, the agitator and the troublemaker. Defying armies of sceptics, including myself (full disclosure: until my family rebelled against me and bought a Tesla Model 3 and I started driving it, I was convinced the company would go bankrupt), Musk has built Tesla into a more than $700bn market cap business and forced the car industry to speed up the shift to electric vehicles. Not prone to modesty, Musk estimates he may have accelerated the “advent of sustainable energy” by “10, maybe even 20 years”.
In just over a decade, he has also transformed the commercial space industry and the economics of space, racing ahead of rivals in building a reusable rocket that can carry passengers. Nasa has picked his Starship to land astronauts on the moon over the next few years. It is now worth around $125bn. One day, or so Musk is convinced, it will be used to colonise Mars.