By Joseph BernsteinWhen the world’s richest man isn’t tweeting, he’s flying to Burning Man, trying to impress comedians and hopping on yachts.
Elon Musk at this year’s Met Gala in New York.Credit...Sinna Nasseri/Getty Images
When a snapshot of Elon Musk and Ghislaine Maxwell surfaced on social media in 2020, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive took to Twitter — as he so often does — to explain why he had been photographed with the British socialite, who was later convicted of sex trafficking in connection with the financier Jeffrey Epstein.
“Don’t know Ghislaine at all,” Mr. Musk tweeted in July 2020. “She photo-bombed me once at a Vanity Fair party several years ago. Real question is why VF invited her in the first place.”
It’s not surprising that Mr. Musk felt he had to answer for the photograph, which had been taken six years earlier at the magazine’s Oscars party. His personal life is frequently the subject of intense speculation.
As it turns out, their meeting was slightly more than a photo bomb.
According to a Vanity Fair staff member at the time who stood next to Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Musk and shared contemporaneous notes with The Times, the pair chatted. Ms. Maxwell asked Mr. Musk if there were a way to remove oneself from the internet and encouraged Mr. Musk to destroy the internet; Mr. Musk demurred. Ms. Maxwell then asked Mr. Musk why aliens hadn’t yet made contact with humanity, to which Mr. Musk replied that all civilizations eventually end — including Maxwell’s hypothetical alien one — and raised the possibility that humans are living in a simulation.
