He is one of the world's wealthiest men - sometimes the richest, depending on the price of Tesla shares, his main financial asset. With many other high-profile companies under his wing, including Tesla, Space X, Starlink, and Neuralink, he is also a subject of global fascination.
Then, of course, there is his personal story - the tall, 51-year-old billionaire with ten children ranging in age from one to 18. His first son died aged just ten weeks. Musk, who was born in South Africa, has described living with Asperger's syndrome, a type of autism, and stated that his main goal in life is to colonize Mars.
I have learned that - as, perhaps, with many of us - there are many different faces of Elon Musk.
The persona he projects via his prolific tweets is provocative, controversial, and bombastic. He loves rude memes, knows whatever he says will make headlines worldwide, and enjoys trolling the media with ever more outlandish statements and jokes. He likes trying to goad us journalists, into writing more extreme headlines than ever.
In public, he has learned to be a showman, whether dancing alongside electric-car-making robots, emerging triumphantly from the latest slick Tesla prototype, or being filmed walking into Twitter's headquarters carrying a sink - "Let that sink in" was the gag, playing off a popular meme on the site. This Halloween, he attended a party in leather armor, a $7,500 costume called "the devil's champion."
And yet Tallulah Riley, his ex-wife, whom he married twice, described him in the BBC documentary series The Elon Musk Show as "sweet" and "shy."
Veteran Silicon Valley journalist and author Mike Malone, who has known Mr. Musk for 20 years, tells me he sees "a very reserved, very smart, very introspective and intellectual guy" who spends long transatlantic flights with him reading complex trajectory tables, trying to work out how to land a spacecraft on Mars.
The pair have a long-standing $5 (£4) bet over Mr. Musk's ambition to send people to Mars by 2030. "I said, 'I don't think you can do it - but I hope you do. I hope I owe you the $5,'" Mr. Malone says. "That bet's still floating in the air."
Sending people to Mars is a lifelong goal for Mr. Musk. Some say it is his take on long-termism - a philosophy favored by some wealthy people which seeks to act in the interests of billions of people in the far future rather than focusing on the immediate needs of the present.
At some point, the human race will have to leave Earth, he says. And his interest in space is signposted in his existing business portfolio. But where on Earth does Twitter fit in?
Mr. Musk answered that question this week - in a tweet.
"Social media in general, especially Twitter, were eroding civilization," he wrote. "If civilization collapses before Mars becomes self-sustaining, then nothing else matters. Human consciousness is gone."
But how was Twitter "eroding civilization"?
Mr. Musk said, at the very beginning, his aim in buying the platform was to create a 21st Century digital, a global town square for discussing society's significant issues.
He has written many times about perceived imbalance under the previous regime, arguing that right-leaning views were given less visibility by Twitter staff than left-leaning ones, skewing debate and creating echo chambers where nobody saw material that challenged their existing viewpoint. He published the "Twitter files" with some handpicked journalists, " a selected set of internal documents, to support his view.
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