It’s official: Elon Musk is a bona fide celebrity. He’s appeared in Iron Man 2 and his actions appeal to people who don’t obsessively follow his work at Tesla Motors. Or SpaceX. Or who send money online. He also makes the late-night talk show rounds, and chatted with Jimmy Kimmel last week. Oddly enough, while Musk and his Twitter tirades against a questionable road test article in The New York Times had been getting tons of attention, Kimmel didn’t even ask the Tesla Motors CEO about it. Tesla’s first-ever quarterly profit didn’t come up, either.
Kimmel introduced Musk as the co-founder of PayPal and the founder of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX, but he left out the electric car part. The interview was all about SpaceX and trips to Mars. “He will lead us to Mars whether we want to go there or not,” Kimmel said in the introduction.