‘Drama magnet’ Elon Musk’s life of ‘toxic’ women and ‘chaos’

Elon Musk’s rise to become the world’s richest man has been fueled by a wild combination, according to a new book: a penchant for “toxic” girlfriends like Amber Heard, battles with everyone from his brother to employees, an appetite for incredible risk and a love of game playing — both the video variety and the emotional kind.

“I’m just wired for war, basically,” Elon told biographer Walter Isaacson for the 688-page book “Elon Musk,” which hit stores Tuesday.

Apparently, Errol and Heard — who dated Elon for about a year after her high-profile 2016 split from Johnny Depp — have something in common.

“[Amber] was just so toxic,” Kimbal Musk, Elon’s younger brother, says in the book. “A nightmare. She really is a very good actress, so she will say things that you’re like, ‘Wow, maybe she’s telling you the truth’ but she isn’t. The way she can create reality reminds me of my dad.”

The ghost of Elon’s notorious father, Errol — whom he once called “evil” and relentlessly abusive — also haunts the pages.

Errol, now 77, chose Father’s Day 2022 to tell Elon that he’d fathered a second child with former stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout — one of numerous “evil” moves made in his life, according to his sons.

The book is rife with descriptions of how “socially awkward” Elon, who self-diagnosed himself with Asperger’s syndrome, himself lacks empathy and bears similarities to his father, telling both staffers and girlfriends that they are “stupid” or “idiots” when under stress.

Still, he appears to be most scarred not by his rough childhood but the rejection of his transgender daughter.

The 19-year-old, who is a fraternal twin to brother Griffin, transitioned to female in 2020 and legally changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson.

“I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,” she told a court in 2022.

Though Musk publicly brushed off Vivian’s spurning of him by quipping, “Can’t win them all,” one of his ex-girlfriends, the singer Grimes, told Isaacson that the girl’s rejection kills Elon.

“He loves Jenna so much and truly accepts her,” Grimes says in the book. “I’ve never seen him as heartbroken about anything. I know he’d do anything to be able to see her or have her, like, accept him again.”The twins, Vivian and Griffin, are the oldest of Elon’s 10 living children and, along with 17-year-old triplets Kai, Saxon, and Damian, are from his first marriage, to Justine Musk. Most of the older kids are described as being brilliant in math and science. The former couple’s first son, Nevada Alexander Musk, died of sudden infant death syndrome at only 10 weeks old in 2002.

In the book, Elon’s friends and family don’t shy away from weighing in on the women they didn’t like, including his first wife, Justine, as well as Heard.

Elon met Justine Wilson while he was a virtually penniless student at Queen’s University in Ontario and married her in 2000. 

His brother, Kimbal, “couldn’t stand” Justine and tried to do an “intervention” to keep him from marrying her. His mother, Maye, says in the book that “She has no redeeming feature.”

Before they finally divorced in 2008, Elon and Justine had massive and frequent fights — something that apparently is not uncommon for him. Musk also got into fistfights with his brother when they were running one of his early companies.

Elon told Isaacson that his rough-and-tumble existence was honed in his “violent” home country of South Africa, where he once was beaten so badly in school by bullies that he had to be hospitalized. Errol’s response was to berate Elon for an hour, blaming him for provoking the bullies.

Elon also has three kids with Grimes (née Claire Boucher): son X Æ A-Xii, 3; daughter Exa Dark Sideræl (known as Y), 1, and infant Techno Mechanicus, whose birth was only recently announced.

One of Elon’s top Neuralink executives, Shivon Zilis, secretly gave birth to his twins, Strider and Azure, in November 2021 — less than a month before the arrival of Y. 

Grimes, whose on-off relationship with Elon is apparently off as of late, is just one of the many women he has juggles with the same odd mix of aplomb and chaos, depending on the day, as he does with his multiple businesses.

His relationship with British actress Talulah Riley, whom he married and divorced twice between 2010 and 2016, sounds the most normal. He told Riley prior to their first marriage that life with him would be difficult because “I take the hard path” but Riley said she was game — until she wasn’t. The toll of Musk’s workaholism wore on her more than any emotional abuse, according to the book.

Riley laments her ex’s attraction to pain, while Kimbal calls Elon a “drama magnet.

Referencing Heard and others, Kimbal says: “it’s really sad that Elon falls for people who are mean to him. They’re beautiful, no question, but they have a very dark side and Elon knows they are toxic.”

Elon is described in the book as having been very much in love with Heard and he apparently took their break-up very hard.

But then he can be shockingly cruel, as evidenced by the secret twins he kept from Grimes.

One of the book’s more arresting passages involves the singer going to the hospital when the surrogate who was pregnant with her and Elon’s daughter was experiencing complications.

Unknown to her, Zilis, who was a close companion to Elon as well as his employee, was giving birth to his twins in the very same hospital. Grimes was “outraged” when she found out, Isaacson claims.

The drama surrounding that apparently continues.

“Tell Shivon to unblock me and tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer,” she wrote in a mysterious, since-deleted post on Sept. 6 “I have never even been allowed to see a photo of these children until this moment, despite the situation utterly ripping my family apart.”

Grimes has since squashed the beef, however.

“I spoke with Shivon at length finally, which was long overdue,” Grimes later posted on X. “This wasn’t her fault, plz [sic] don’t be angry at her! We respect each other a lot and we’re excited to become friends and have the kids grow up together.”

Grimes says Musk can enter into “demon mode,” causing him to be “dark” and act “with a real lack of empathy” at times, she says, but can also be loving. “He cried like a wolf” at the bedside of his dying son, Nevada, Maye Musk tells Isaacson.

Elon’s relationships with both Grimes and Zilis seem murky and complicated at best, and the book also mentions 28-year-old actress Natasha Bassett as an on-again-off-again girlfriend.

But his biggest love — and No. 1 stress reliever — appears to be video games. Elon first encountered them on a childhood trip to Florida with his father and siblings and was immediately hooked.

“One day … after a tense argument with some engineers over the need for safety chains being used when moving the Starship booster, Musk retreated to sit on a piece of equipment on the edge of a parking lot and played two intense games of Polytopia on his phone against Zilis … ,” Isaacson writes.

“He just absolutely crushed me, both games,” Zilis said.

Much of the book deals with Elon’s superhuman efforts involving the purchase of huge companies and trying to keep them afloat. He often flies by the seat of his pants in what sound like a series of comic misadventures: negotiating with Russians for rockets, launching SpaceX test missiles off an isolated atoll in the Marshall Islands, wading into an ill-fated meeting with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his posse of “goons.” But he just as often lands on his feet.

His takeover of Twitter had partly to do with his swing to the right and concern over free speech — a worry that became more personal, he said, as he believes his transgender daughter Vivian turned against him because of “Marxist” teachings she learned at her posh Santa Monica school, Crossroads.

“Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he tells Isaacson, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.” 

The Musks have a Christmas tradition of asking everyone to reflect on a question and a recent one involved what regrets everyone had.

“My main regret,” Elon responded,” “is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.”

His first wife, Justine, however, seems to still see the good in Musk.

“With Errol there was a sense that really bad things could happen around him,” she tells Isaacson. “Whereas if the zombie apocalypse happened, you’d want to be on Elon’s team because he would figure out a way to get those zombies in line. He can be very harsh, but at the end of the day you can trust him to find a way to prevail.”