For most people, forgetting to buy your spouse a Christmas present might end with a sheepish apology and a promise to make it up later. But Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who was simultaneously trying to launch rockets to orbit and cars to the masses, turned his oversight into an epic midnight quest through subzero snow—barefoot, no less.

Talulah Riley, his wife at the time, shared the story in the 2022 BBC series "The Elon Musk Show." It was Christmas Eve in Boulder, Colorado, where they were surrounded by "loads and loads of snow." Musk, stretched thin across his budding empire, suddenly remembered his blunder. He turned to her and said, "It's not that I don't love you—I do really, really love you. It's just that my brain is exploding."

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Riley brushed it off. "I was like, ‘I know, it's fine,'" she recalled. But Musk couldn't let it go. In the dead of night, he slipped out of bed, dressed only in a T-shirt and shorts, and vanished into the blizzard without shoes. 

"He got up in the middle of the night and disappeared. I was like, where has he gone?" she said. He came back two hours later, having gone outside barefoot, dug through the snow, and picked flowers after walking all over Boulder. He returned with a little bouquet of picked flowers and one simple line: "I just wanted to show you how much I loved you."

The gesture wasn't just romantic—it was a raw snapshot of Musk at his most human, amid a year that nearly broke him. 

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At the time, SpaceX was teetering after years of launch failures, its survival hinging on a fresh $1.6 billion NASA contract for the Dragon capsule. 

Tesla, meanwhile, was deep in execution mode, transitioning from its niche Roadster to the broader-market Model S. With a $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy in hand, the company was racing to scale production ahead of the Model S debut in June 2012. 

SolarCity, the solar company Musk chaired and helped finance, was still finding its footing in the shaky post-recession economy.

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That Christmas, the pressure short-circuited the basics. Yet instead of waving it off, Musk attacked the problem like one of his engineering puzzles: head-on, no matter the cost. The flowers, wilted and absurd in the snow, became his fix—a zero-dollar proof of devotion when everything else was exploding.

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Image: Imagn