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He also has a complicated relationship with women. He fathered six children — a son, who died at ten weeks in 2002, twins and triplets — with his first wife, the Canadian author Justine Wilson. He met his second wife, the actress Talulah Riley, in 2008, married her in 2010, divorced her two years later, remarried her the next year, then filed for divorce again, then withdrew the filing, then refiled for divorce and finally followed through with it in 2016. And friendship? That’s complicated. Musk was viciously bullied in school — once he was beaten so badly he was taken to hospital. The hardest part, he recalls, was that “they got my best friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that hurt.” Despite, or perhaps because of, his problems with people, he has dedicated his life to saving the human race. In 2018, Musk’s ambition came a whole lot closer. His rocket building company SpaceX successfully launched into orbit the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket in the world with the power to lift a mass greater than a 737 jetliner loaded with passengers, crew, luggage and fuel. Only the Saturn V moon rocket — last flown in 1973 — delivered more payload to orbit. The Falcon Heavy is a remarkable achievement, yet for Musk it was just the beginning of his journey into space. He fired his rocket at Mars (although he overshot slightly) to prove that manned missions to the Red Planet were possible. The 48-year-old South African-born entrepreneur had claimed that he will be living on Mars when he is in his fifties. The Falcon Heavy’s payload was another insane Musk dream: a Tesla Roadster, the first all-electric sports car, with a spacesuit-clad human dummy at the wheel, a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the glove compartment and David Bowie’s Space Oddity on loop. 066| SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL | 067 he will be living on Mars when he is in his fifties Elon Musk claimed that: