Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have been rampaging through the federal government. But before he was letting his DOGE team accidentally fire nuclear safety workers and declaring that he loved Donald Trump “as much as a straight man can love another man,” he supported Barack Obama.

That is, Musk is a complicated, mercurial man. To better understand him, seven Vox writers tell us what they’ve learned that helps them make sense of the billionaire.

A man with an extraordinary risk tolerance

Per his biographer Ashlee Vance, Musk earned about $250 million, or $180 million after taxes, selling PayPal to eBay. He then turned around and threw the money into new ventures: $100 million to SpaceX, $70 million to Tesla, $10 million to SolarCity. “Short of building an actual money-crushing machine, Musk could not have picked a faster way to destroy his fortune,” Vance writes. The gambles worked out, of course, but easily could have bankrupted him. The appetite for danger extends to his personal life. At one of his birthday parties, Musk both had a knife thrower hurl blades at him as he was blindfolded, and made himself face off against a 350-pound champion sumo wrestler.
—Dylan Matthews

A hint from 2018

In hindsight, Musk’s 2018 feud with a British cave explorer might have foreshadowed the darkening of his politics.

That year, 12 boys and their soccer coach became trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. Elon Musk offered to aid the Thai government’s rescue effort by contributing a mini-submarine. But authorities deemed Musk’s offer impractical and turned it down.

An international team ultimately rescued the boys. And in a subsequent interview, a British cave explorer who’d assisted in that effort, Vern Urnsworth, said that Musk’s offer “had absolutely no chance of working” and that mogul “had no conception of what the cave passage was like.”

Musk replied by calling Unsworth a “pedo” and saying he would bet money that the British diver was a predator, a claim for which the billionaire had no evidence whatsoever.

This incident........

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