Tesla CEO Elon Musk’ ex-wife Talulah Riley revealed how Musk managed to express his love for her despite the mounting pressures of running multiple companies. In a BBC series The Elon Musk Show in 2022, Riley described how Musk was overwhelmed by the pressure of running Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity and realised late on Christmas Eve in Boulder, Colorado, that he had forgotten to buy her a present. “It’s not that I don’t love you—I do really, really love you. It’s just that my brain is exploding,” he told her.Riley recalled that on a Christmas eve Elon Musk recalled the occasion and slipped out the bed in the middle of the night. She mentioned that Musk was only wearing a T-shirt and short and then he went into the snow without any slippers. He then returned hours later with a bouquet of hand-picked flowers which he had dug out of the frozen ground. Giving the flowers to Riley Musk said, “I just wanted to show you how much I loved you.”

Stress behind the scenes

Riley mentioned that Elon Musk was under immense strain at that time. SpaceX was fighting for survival after repeated failures and Tesla was racing to deliver the Model S with a $465 million government loan and SolarCity was struggling to gain traction. Riley recalled how she was worried about Elon Musk’s health. ““He was under incredible stress. I was worried he was going to have a heart attack. I just kept thinking, God, I’ve got to keep this guy alive,” Riley said.

A human side to the tech titan

The midnight gesture, though unconventional, became a symbol of Musk’s emotional intensity. Riley has often defended him against perceptions of being cold or detached. “He is the most emotional person I know,” she said. “He feels very, very deeply.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tells what makes Elon Musk ‘very special’

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has previously praised Elon Musk for his contribution in the advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), saying he’s doing just the right things. In a recent podcast with Joe Rogan, Huang again commended the Tesla CEO, recounting an episode when he was the sole early buyer of the DGX-1 AI supercomputer in 2016. Huang further said that later he personally delivered the machine to X (formerly Twitter) owner in a small room that turned out to be OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.“When I announced this thing, nobody in the world wanted it. I had no purchase orders—not one. Nobody wanted to buy it. Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon. He was at the event, and we were doing a fireside chat about the future of self-driving cars,” he told Rogan.However, the excitement was quickly dampened when Musk told him that he has a non-profit company.“And he goes, ‘You know what? I have a company that could really use this.’ And I said, ‘Wow, my first customer.’ I was pretty excited about it. And he goes, ‘Yeah, we have this company. It’s a non-profit company’,” Huang said, recounting the moment during a fireside chat.