The great journalist Walter Isaacson has a big biography of Elom Musk coming out next month. It’s called “Elon Musk,” just to make things easy. Walter’s written thick bios of Steve Jobs and Henry Kissinger, and was once the editor of Time magazine, among other things.
On Twitter or X today Walter offers a little excerpt about how Musk met the singer Grimes after breaking up with Amber Heard. Just hearing about Musk having human relationships is odd, but this is kind of sweet in its own bizarre way. I’ve edited it in paragraph breaks just to make it easy to read.
Simon & Schuster is the publisher. They’re being sold this week to New York billionaire Henry Kravis’s legendary finance group, by the way. KKR did a good job when they owned New York magazine years ago, I hope they do the same for S&S.
from the book:
“Every now and then, often at the most complex of times, the Creators of Our Simulation—those rascals who conjure up what we are led to believe is reality—drop in a sparky new element, one that creates chaotic new subplots. And thus into Musk’s life in the spring of 2018, amid the emotional tsunami caused by his breakup with Amber Heard, came a waiflike weaver of sounds, Claire Boucher, known as Grimes, a smart and spellbinding performance artist whose appearance would lead to new children, on-and-off domesticity, and even a public battle with an unhinged rapper.
Born in Vancouver, Grimes had produced four albums by the time she started dating Musk. Drawing on science fiction themes and memes, her mesmerizing music combined sonic texture with elements of dream pop and electronica. She had an adventuresome curiosity that led her to become interested in eclectic ideas, such as a thought experiment known as Roko’s basilisk, which posits that artificial intelligence could get out of control and torture any human who had not helped it gain power. These are the types of things that she and Musk worry about. When Musk wanted to tweet a pun about it, he Google-searched to find an image, and he discovered that Grimes had made it an element of her 2015 music video “Flesh without Blood.” She and Musk got into a Twitter exchange that led, in the modern way, to direct-messaging and texting.
They had met before and, ironically, it was when Musk was in an elevator with Amber Heard. “Remember that elevator meeting?” Grimes asked during a late-night conversation I had with her and Musk. “I mean that was super weird.” “Of all the times to meet,” Musk agreed. “You were staring at me very intensely.” “No,” she corrected, “you were the one giving me a weird stare.” After they met again through the Roko’s basilisk exchange on Twitter, Musk invited her to fly up to Fremont to visit his factory, his idea of a good date. “We just walked the floor all night, and I watched him try to fix things,” Grimes says. The next night, while driving her to a restaurant, he showed how fast the car accelerated, then took his hands off the wheel, covered his eyes, and let her experience Autopilot. “I was like, oh shit, this guy is fucking crazy,” she says. “The car was signaling and changing lanes by itself. It felt like a scene out of a Marvel movie.”
At the restaurant, he carved “EM+CB” on the wall. When she compared his powers to those of Gandalf, he gave her a rapid-fire trivia test on Lord of the Rings. He wanted to see whether she was truly a faithful fan. She passed. “That mattered to me,” Musk says. As a gift, she gave him a box of animal bones she had collected. In the evenings, they listened to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and other history podcasts and audiobooks. “The only way I could be in a serious relationship is if the person I’m dating can also listen to an hour of, like, war history before bed,” she says.
