Elon Musk Has the World's Strangest Social Calendar - The New York Times - 0 views
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They describe someone whose closest friendships (many of them longstanding) are with other wealthy tech luminaries of middle age.
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He regularly takes meetings until 9 or 10 p.m., but when he goes out, he does so with frenetic bombast, almost as if live-action role-playing a billionaire playboy
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A fan of lavish costume parties, Mr. Musk revels in settings, like the desert art festival/rave Burning Man, where he can take on a role outside himself.
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Mr. Musk favors intense, one-on-one conversations — one person described a party conversation with him for 90 unbroken minutes about astrophysics.
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Mr. Musk once acknowledged in an interview with Axel Springer’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, that he gets lonely; in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, he said that as a child he vowed to never be alone.
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One obvious way that he staves off loneliness is using Twitter. Mr. Musk, who frequently responds to the many Regular Joe accounts that tweet at him, uses the service almost every day, in a way that suggests the website is an outlet not just for his ideas but for his emotions.
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“I spent almost every day with Elon for five years — apart from family time, he spends nearly every waking hour working,” Mr. Teller said. “If your idea of fun is a long weekend of rocket engineering in a humid, sparsely populated corner of South Texas, then you should be jealous of Elon’s social life.”
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Many of his closest friends are longtime investors in his companies and share his technical worldview and his geeky preoccupations. Mostly in their 40s and 50s, these friends often see Mr. Musk at quiet dinners in the private back rooms of restaurants — low-key affairs in which the conversation turns to subjects like science fiction or World War II fighter planes.
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ebecca Eisenberg, a lawyer in Palo Alto, Calif., who was senior counsel at PayPal from 2001 to 2007, was catching up with Mr. Thiel, she said, when Mr. Musk broke into the conversation. According to Ms. Eisenberg, Mr. Musk expressed his opinion that China was likely to invade Taiwan and that the American workers at a new Taiwan-owned chip factory in Arizona would never be as skillful as their Taiwan counterparts. Mr. Thiel, meanwhile, was largely quiet.
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“I have two teenagers and four pets,” Ms. Eisenberg said. “It seemed like Peter was the dominant dog, and Elon was trying to impress him.”