Finding out what celebrities were like before they were successful can be fascinating – or it can just be a biography of a person when they were still ordinary. The Elon Musk Show (BBC Two) begins with the latter.
Two subsequent episodes ought to deal with the real Elon Musk, which is to say the increasingly unreal public figure, who has become a brand more recognisable than any of his companies, matching his unprecedented wealth with outlandish behaviour. Sure, this account of his early days paints him as a goofy loner, but his eccentricity only properly manifests in his prowling, Trump-like gait. There’s no harbinger of the man who will one day release a SoundCloud jam called RIP Harambe, dangerously minimise Covid, attempt to send a special submarine to rescue a football team trapped in a cave, name a child X Æ A-12 and, just in the last week, send Kanye West a supportive tweet after the rapper’s antisemitic Instagram meltdown. “Fame is not something that agrees with him,” a former colleague accurately deadpans, as a hopefully more exciting second instalment is previewed at the end of the opening hour.
