MEGA-RICH Elon Musk likes to think out of the box – and the world’s wealthiest person reckons his on-off girlfriend is a figment of his imagination.
The 51-year-old South African-born spacecraft and electric car tycoon’s take on Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes, 31, is revealed in new BBC2 documentary The Elon Musk Show.
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The Wednesday-night three-part series that started this week explores the inside story of Musk — who also holds American and Canadian citizen-ships — in chats with family, friends and foes.
His musings on his girlfriend are related by Vanity Fair journalist Devin Gordon, who says Grimes told him how Musk has a theory she is a simulation created by him as his perfect companion.
While this may sound more out there than his beloved outer space, it is not the first time Musk, said to be worth nearly £200Billion, has strayed into the realm of surreal.
The boss of Tesla cars and rockets firm SpaceX, whose on-off bid to buy Twitter is now back on, has said humans are a simulation in an advanced civilization’s video game and that he himself is an alien, and has challenged Vladimir Putin to a one-on-one fight.
His claims about life on Earth came in 2016 at a computer-coding conference in California, where he said virtual world was becoming “indis-tinguishable from reality”.
Musk — who lives in a modest three-bed house worth £45,000, a short walk from SpaceX’s factory in Texas — added: “So given we’re on a trajectory to have games indistinguishable from reality — and those could be played on any set-top box, PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such — it would seem to follow that the odds we’re in base reality is one in billions.”
Despite claiming the human race may not truly exist, he urges it to breed more.
Musk, who has ten children, by three women, has warned that if birth rates do not rise “civilization is going to crumble”.
He bats off those who worry about impacts on climate and inequality, insisting: “I can’t emphasise enough, there are not enough people.”
But Musk — who has married three times including twice to English actress Talulah Riley, 37 — has maybe made tricky for his own kids by giving them seriously odd names.
His two with Grimes are called X Æ A-XII and Exa Dark Sideræl. Er, a boy and a girl.
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Meanwhile, if life on Earth crumbles, he has a plan — colonise Mars and build everything from “iron foundries to pizza joints”.
But he warned in 2016: “The first journey to Mars is going to be very dangerous. Risk of fatality will be high.”
He added: “Mars, especially in the beginning, will not be luxurious. The sales pitch for going is, ‘It’s dangerous, it’s cramped. You might not make it back’.”
Yet he suggested it could be warmed up by just dropping “thermo-nuclear weapons over the poles”.
Anyway, Mars may suit Musk. On The Joe Rogan Experience pod-cast in 2018, asked by Rogan where he gets all his ideas, he said: “I’m an alien.”
Lately, he has also waded into Putin’s war in Ukraine. He donated satellite internet, through Space X, to Ukraine.
He also tweeted: “I challenge Vladimir Putin to single combat. Stakes are Ukraine.”
He had planned to stop the satellite aid but yesterday U-turned. Yet he has urged Ukraine to seek peace by surrendering territory and pledging to stay “neutral”.
