Elon Musk is the richest person in the world – he’s got about $219bn, give or take, and is rarely out of the headlines. But that doesn’t make him the most interesting person in the world, or worthy of such a lavish attempt to find out what makes him the Musk he is in The Elon Musk Show (BBC Two). His main achievement in life, though unheralded, is actually to prove that, just as money can’t buy you love, happiness or good looks, so it can’t make you inherently more fascinating than God or how nature fashioned you.
This is the central flaw in the BBC’s overly deferential series. The programme-makers seem to have got a bit mixed up between Musk’s cosmic ambitions and material achievements on the one hand, and his not-so-magnetic personality on the other. The tales about how he successively built PayPal, Tesla and his tourism outfit SpaceX are indeed awesome, at least in scale. The lad himself? More prosaic.
