There’s a new Walter Isaacson bio of Elon Musk out now, which has arrived on the heels of Ronan Farrow’s bombshell New Yorker profile. Naturally the tome has its own share of weird surprises, including that the prolific haver of children secretly had a third kid with ex-partner Grimes. It also has a slender chapter on another relationship: the one he had with Amber Heard, which according to Musk was not always smooth sailing.
Per Vanity Fair, the two met on, of all places, the set of 2013’s sequel Machete Kills, which at one point improbably involves our big knife-wielding hero slicing up baddies on a space station. Guess who was a consultant on this part of the movie? Elon Musk. Still, they didn’t really make a connection until a year later, when Musk treated her to a tour of Space X and gave her a spin in a Tesla (that presumably didn’t crash).
It wasn’t until Heard split from Johnny Depp that the two reconnected again, this time as a couple. Their dates reportedly included trips to a rope course and a wildlife sanctuary — typical billionaire stuff. At one point, Isaacson writes, “He told her that she reminded him of Mercy, his favorite character in the video game Overwatch, so she spent two months designing and commissioning a head-to-toe costume so she could role-play for him.”
Heard was not a hit with Musk’s inner circle. His brother called her “toxic,” and Musk’s chief of staff compared her to “the Joker.” Grimes, meanwhile, described her as “chaotic evil,” whereas she is, by her own estimation, “chaotic good.”
Still, Musk’s relationship with Heard meant enough to him that after they broke up in the summer of 2017, he didn’t take it well. It didn’t help that it coincided with some professional unpleasantness on top of news about his dad having fathered a secret child he’d never heard about. Musk described this mixture as “eighteen months of unrelenting insanity.”
What did Heard have to say about dating the guy who would later screw up Twitter? “I love him very much,” she told Isaacson. “Elon loves fire, and sometimes it burns him.”
(Via Vanity Fair)