Convenience Big Store: The billionaire genius “driven by demons”

17 September, 2023

Life

Musk at the Met Gala last year. Theo Wargo/Getty

The billionaire genius "driven by demons"

When Walter Isaacson began his biography of Elon Musk, he tells the FT, he informed the billionaire: "I have to be at your side for two years and I want to talk to you almost every day – I want to be like Boswell doing Doctor Johnson." Why did Musk agree? "He loves history," says Isaacson, "and he has a big enough ego that he thinks of himself as a historical figure." The result was a "wild ride" that left the historian grappling with big questions: do you have to be half-crazy to be truly innovative, or a genius? And how do you stop a brilliant mind from spinning out of control?

Initially, Isaacson was expecting the book to be "easy". His new subject was riding high – Tesla had sold almost a million cars and SpaceX had 31 successful launches, making Musk the richest man in the world. But the entrepreneur "doesn't like things when they are going well. He is addicted to drama." So, perhaps out of boredom, Musk hatched a plan to take over Twitter. Then Isaacson watched him, not content with the colossal headache from purchasing a social media company, embark on a secretive drive to create an AI firm, hoping to use the vast stores of data from Twitter and Tesla to leapfrog other AI companies. How is he able to do all this? "He is driven by demons," says Isaacson. "Musk goes through manic mood swings and deep depressions and risk-seeking highs, and if he didn't have that risk-seeking maniacal personality he would not be the person who launched EVs and got rockets into orbit."

👨‍👧‍👦 Musk has had 11 children by three mothers. Many, like him, are based in Austin, since "he likes having his children around". Do the mothers get on? "Not with each other."

🚚 He likes to get things done, says The Wall Street Journal. Just before Christmas, Musk wanted to save money by shutting down a Twitter data centre in Sacramento, California and move the servers to another site. "Staff warned it would take months," so on Christmas Eve Musk hired some moving vans, went to the data centre with several lieutenants, and began shifting the servers himself.

Quirk of history

An 1894 ad for the "Tonic of Kings"

The cocaine-laced wine loved by popes and presidents

As modern bartenders compete to put their own distinctive spin on obscure cocktail recipes, says Open Culture, many are turning to "anachronistic spirits" like mahia, the Moroccan Jewish brandy, and Chartreuse, the Carthusian monks' secret elixir. One bygone booze they are unlikely to resurrect is Vin Mariani, a Belle Époque tonic wine loved by Queen Victoria, Ulysses S Grant and Emile Zola. The reason is that the restorative beverage, invented by Corsican chemist Angelo Mariani in 1863, was laced with cocaine. Impressed by the pep it produced in natives on a visit to South America, Mariani added ground coca leaves to a bottle of Bordeaux, et voilà.

Unsurprisingly, the resulting concoction caught on, not just to take the edge off, but as a medical cure-all. The recommended dose for adults was "two or three glasses a day"; and half that amount for children. Mariani was not just an expert chemist, but also a kind of "marketing genius", sending complimentary cases of his gak-laced booze to dozens of celebrities. And it worked. The most famous actress of the day, Sarah Bernhardt, conferred "superstar status" on the drink, declaring it the "King of Tonics, Tonic of Kings". Pope Leo XIII not only carried "a personal hip flask" of the stuff to "fortify himself in those moments when prayer was insufficient" – he invented and awarded a Vatican gold medal to Vin Mariani "in recognition of benefits received."

Property

THE BOLTHOLE Built as part of Swale House around 1750, this fully refurbished Grade II listed cottage in Richmond, North Yorkshire has a generous garden with far-reaching views, and all the benefits of living in the heart of a charming market town. The kitchen boasts high vaulted ceilings, windows on both sides, and underfloor heating beneath the Egyptian stone tiles. Both double bedrooms have en suite shower rooms. Darlington station is a 25-minute drive, with trains to London in two and a half hours. £375,000.

Comment

Don't mention the war. Or, apparently, Fawlty Towers

Literal-mindedness is taking over the West

When people suffer damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, it can leave them unable to understand context or metaphor. So if you say, "I have a heavy heart", they think you're talking about an "enlarged ticker" rather than sadness. With that in mind, I'm beginning to think Western civilisation has "right-hemisphere damage". Cancel culture, the assault on history, political polarisation, the absence of irony and nuance – these are all examples of a "context-blind, literalist age". Consider the recent Oxfam guide that tells staff not to say they "stand with" people they support, because it "potentially alienates people unable to stand". Likewise, when I asked a senior media figure why the "Don't mention the war!" episode of Fawlty Towers had been removed, he told me, po-faced: "Because it's insulting to Germans." I tried to tell him it was actually a satire on the English. Waste of time.

Literal-mindedness has always existed to some degree, of course. The Marxists of the 1950s, the neoclassical economists of the 1980s, the new atheists of the 2000s – all had difficulty in "accommodating ideas that transcend rigid templates". But "literalistic thinking" has grown in recent decades, "like a lesion rippling out across the cortex of our culture". The root of the problem is communication. Over human history we have moved from "grunts and gestures" to symbolic art, language, Shakespeare, and so on – all of which have "broadened the scope of metaphorical thinking, building empathy and contextual understanding". But today, our "collective gaze" is directed not upwards but down at our smartphones, at social media platforms "commercially designed to strangle empathy, nuance, metaphor, allegory and complex thought". No wonder we're losing our sense of what to take literally.

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Books

Queen Elizabeth II with Elton John. Dave Thompson/Getty

Early in his career, Elton John was hired to do a private concert for Queen Elizabeth II, says the musician's longtime writing partner Bernie Taupin in his new memoir. I was only too happy to be a "fly on the wall". The gig in question took place in a drab and musty room in what felt like "the bowels of Windsor Castle". The audience was small, but contained "enough overdressed patricians and eccentricity to warrant weirdness of the first order". The only recognisable presence besides the Queen was Patrick Anson, 5th Earl of Lichfield, a celebrity photographer and "notorious libertine". Sure enough, during a "particularly genteel rendition" of Your Song, the earl keeled over in an "intoxicated stupor". Everyone basically ignored him – clearly, this was "standard procedure" – except the Queen, who turned her head slightly and said "Lichfield's gorn again". Whereupon a "clean-up crew" of four footmen, "powdered wigs and all", trundled in and "whisked him out as if under a cloak of invisibility".

Scattershot by Bernie Taupin is available to buy here.