Twisted Metal
Nobody has ever accused Elon Musk of being a regular guy, but a new excerpt from an upcoming biography casts him as a genuinely tedious nerd — when he isn’t using his electric cars to drive recklessly.
Take a new excerpt posted to Twitter by biographer Walter Isaacson. On one of the billionaire’s first few dates with Claire “Grimes” Boucher, the electronic artist and eventual mother to two of his children, Musk decided to “let her experience Autopilot” — closing his eyes and taking his hands off the wheel while operating one of his Teslas.
“I was like, oh shit, this guy is fucking crazy,” Boucher said in the book. “The car was signaling and changing lanes by itself.'”
Rather than putting her off, however, this stunt — which the Model Y manual advises against — appeared to woo the artist, who added that the whole thing “felt like a scene out of a Marvel movie.”
You Shall Not Pass
The episode also led to Boucher comparing Musk’s “powers” to those of Lord of the Rings’ Gandalf, which in turn led to Musk giving her a “rapid-fire trivia test on Lord of the Rings” to see if she was “truly a faithful fan” of the franchise.”
Grimes passed the pop quiz, and as Musk told the biographer, “that mattered to me.”
It apparently mattered to her too.
“As a gift,” Isaacson writes, “she gave him a box of animal bones she had collected.”
Another striking anecdote from the couple’s first few days together back in 2018: Musk had Boucher visit the Tesla factory, where they walked around the factory floor at night — the billionaire’s “idea of a good date.”
“We just walked the floor all night,” Grimes told the biographer, “and I watched him try to fix things.”
If you’re cringing, you’re not alone — though given Grimes’ own weirdness, it’s almost sweet if you can ignore that the would-be Romeo in question is, you know, Elon Musk.
The on-again, off-again couple were reported to have officially split after they had their second child together via surrogate, but if anyone could make it work, it’s these crazy kids.
