Elon Musk once got so drunk after downing several shots of vodka during a business meeting in Moscow that he “passed out,” according to excerpts from a new book.
Musk flew to the Russian capital in 2002 to negotiate the purchase of rockets for his proposed mission to Mars that would land a greenhouse on the surface of the red planet, writes Walter Isaacson in the new biography about the world’s richest man.
The night before, he had stopped in Paris, where Musk partied late into the night, according to Isaacson.
He arrived hung over and “ragged” for the business lunch at the Moscow restaurant to meet with an unidentified Russian businessman, according to a copy of the book, “Elon Musk,” obtained by The Post.
Musk and his two associates — rocket engineer Jim Cantrell and venture capitalist Adeo Ressi — were seated in a backroom, where they were served “small bites of food interspersed with large shots of vodka,” wrote Isaacson, who was given unprecedented access to Musk and shadowed him for two years.
“I calculated the weight of the food and the weight of the vodka, and they were roughly equal,” Musk told Isaacson.
Isaacson then writes: “Musk, who was holding his head up with his hand, passed out, and his head slammed into the table.”
Musk, who had yet to found Space X at the time of the meeting, came away mostly empty-handed from the trip, according to Isaacson.
The mogul thought he had an agreement to buy two Dnepr rockets for $18 million, but the Russians’ asking price was actually $18 million for each of the two rockets, Isaacson reported.
Musk balked at the price, prompting the Russians to demand $21 million for each rocket, according to the biography.
“Oh, little boy, you don’t have the money?” the Russians said to Musk, taunting him.
The three men were given a bottle of vodka as a parting gift. The label on the bottom included a photo depicting each of the men on Mars.
The collapse of the talks prompted Musk to abandon Mars Oasis, the goal of which was to grow a plant in Martian soil as a publicity stunt to boost interest in space travel to the planet.
Musk then decided that instead of relying on the Russians or anyone else to provide a rocket, he could simply build one himself.
Weeks after the meeting, Musk would go on to found SpaceX, the aerospace firm and rocket-launching company whose goal is to make space travel and interplanetary transport affordable to the masses.
As of July, SpaceX reportedly had a valuation of nearly $150 billion.
Musk is not known to be an avid drinker, though he was photographed at the World Cup in Qatar last year sipping from a wine glass.
Last summer, Musk was seen holding a drink while shirtless aboard a yacht off the coast of Mykonos, where he was celebrating his newlywed friend, super-agent Ari Emanuel.
“A little red wine, vintage record, some Ambien… and magic!” Musk wrote in a 2017 post on the social media platform which was then known as Twitter but has since been rebranded X after the mogul acquired the company for $44 billion last year.
Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk consumes small doses of ketamine to treat depression and takes full doses of the popular club drug when he attends parties.
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