Elon Musk recently crossed a line no human being had ever crossed before. After his rocket company SpaceX debuted on the stock market in the largest public offering in history, Musk's fortune surpassed one trillion dollars, making him the world's first trillionaire. His wealth now remains at more than the next few richest people on the planet combined, which is a massive amount.
But beyond the headlines about rockets, electric cars, and massive wealth, he is a man who has lived a very human personal life. Musk has been married more than once, has many children, and has often spoken about how heavily his work weighs on him. Previously, British actress Talulah Riley, who married Musk twice, shared a small, adorable, and surprisingly sweet story from their time together. This story says far more about who Musk really is than any of his professional achievements ever could.
When Elon Musk fetched a hand-picked flower bouquet for his then-wife
Riley looked back on the years when she and Musk were living in Boulder, Colorado, and shared an adorable incident on "The Elon Musk Show," a BBC documentary first broadcast in 2022, which brought together Musk's life through interviews with his family, friends, employees and acquaintances. A clipping from this show is also doing rounds on social media, where, according to Riley, things went wrong one December. Musk had completely forgotten to buy her a Christmas present. "It was one of the bad Christmases," she recalled in the documentary, describing a town buried under "loads and loads of snow."
When he realised his slip-up, Musk didn't try to hide it. He admitted what had happened and told her, "It's not that I don't love you — I do really, really love you. It's just that my brain is exploding."
He went barefoot through the snow
Riley said she let it go. But Musk couldn't. Later that night, she is heard saying in the clip, "He quietly slipped out of bed and disappeared," leaving her wondering where he had gone. Two hours passed before he came back, and the state he returned in stunned her. According to Riley, Musk had gone outside in nothing but a T-shirt and shorts, with no shoes on his feet, and had walked across Boulder in the freezing cold. He had dug through the snow and picked flowers by hand. "He'd walked all over Boulder and came back with a little bouquet of picked flowers," Riley said, "and he was like, 'I just wanted to show you how much I loved you.'" It was, in every sense, a gift money couldn't buy.
The ex-couple speaks well of each other
For Riley, the moment told something about Musk that often gets missed. The couple first married in 2010 and divorced in 2012, then reconciled and married again in 2013 before parting in 2016. Even so, she has continued to speak warmly of him, once calling him the "perfect ex-husband" and thanking him in the acknowledgments of one of her novels.
