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.
Between relentless travel, 100-hour workweeks, and three high-stakes ventures in various stages of chaos, it's no surprise Riley later recalled just how close to the edge things felt. "He was under incredible stress," she said in the BBC show. "I was worried he was going to have a heart attack. I just kept thinking, God, I've got to keep this guy alive."
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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.
Riley has long defended Musk against the "cold and emotionless" label that sticks to the tech titan. "He is the most emotional person I know," she said. He has a kind of innocence to him. He feels with incredible purity the emotions that he is feeling at the time, whatever that emotion is. He feels very, very deeply."
Today, with Tesla and SpaceX valuations in the trillions, that barefoot trek feels like a footnote. But it endures as a reminder: Even the man plotting Mars colonies has his limits—and when they hit, he'll freeze his feet off before letting love slip through the cracks.
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