You Only Have to Be Right Once by Randall Lane Read Free Book Online Page A

to the Valles Marineris trench. The real show, though, took place on the manufacturing floor, where the conical Dragon spacecraft awaited its date with the space station.
    Surrounded by the best toys in the history of the planet, Musk returned to his office—a jumbo corner cube, actually, since SpaceX and Tesla embrace the open-seating philosophy—and grabbed a sword, its handle swathed in stingray leather, an award for accomplishments in commercial space, whisking it around his shoulders. “You could really stab somebody with this thing,” he said. “I’m trying to make it swoosh without killing anyone.”
    I held up a sheet of paper for target practice, and Musk, true to his promise, avoided killing me, though he failed to slice the paper, instead pushing it out of my hands. He took revenge on a nearby potted plant, slicing a few leaves off with the precision of a master engineer.
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    AS MUCH AS ELON Musk is known for rational brilliance, he also carries a playboy reputation—nights spent dancing in Afro wigs and leisure suits, closing down Russian clubs in New York, and grokking Burning Man in full. Young, handsome, self-made, he has all the game he needs at any club, including the one in London where he met Talulah Riley, twenty-three at the time, in 2008. So it wasn’t too surprising that, at midnight on a Friday in Hollywood, I was still waiting for Musk to text me.
    The idea was that he would show me, with a group of his friends,
his
Los Angeles—how the City of Angels plays out when money and access are unlimited. We exchanged messages all day about it. But per his last update, he was eating a quiet dinner at Soho House with his close friend,
Iron Man
director Jon Favreau. “We can meet for a drink at the Beverly Hills Hotel (or somewhere else) afterwards,” he texted.
    By 12:30 a.m., though, he wasn’t feeling it: “Just left Soho House. Am on way home and pretty tired. Was up early with the kids, so not much sleep.” Then another message: “The reality is that I very rarely go out to clubs these days. Only did that twice in the past twelve months, because friends dragged me there.” I’d been waiting with friends a few miles away at the Spare Room. Someone in my group suggested I had gotten “hot-chicked”—current L.A. lingo for being replaced by a better offer—but that didn’t ring true. Later, by chance, I heard from someone who had seen Musk with Favreau at Soho House, as he had said. And over the previous three months, he had faithfully returned every phone call, e-mail, and text I sent.
    He did go dark on me once. For three weeks, through Christmas and New Year’s, there had been complete silence, except to cancel a photo shoot. It was as if he had retreated into the rented man cave for extended hibernation.
    A late-night tweet posted on January 17, 2013 explained everything: “@rileytalulah It was an amazing four years. I will love you forever. You will make someone very happy one day.”
    I e-mailed him as soon as I saw the breakup announcement—Musk, back from the breach, called me ten minutes later, at 7:00 a.m. his time. “It just became emotionally difficult,” he said quietly. He sounded different: sad, yes, but also raw and alive. “Essentially, I fell out of love, and it’s kind of hard to get back.” It was a relief to have made the news public, he said, as it had become increasingly evident over the past few months that he and Riley weren’t going to make it.
    It turns out that Riley hadn’t been with Musk in Los Angeles for months. According to court documents, she was the one who filed for divorce.
    The second split (settled for a reported $4 million, followed almost two years later by comments that seemed to imply they have reconciled their relationship, if not their marriage) went easier than the first—a public, very acrimonious