Elon Musk’s 2nd Ex-Wife Says He Invited Her To His Hotel Room To ‘Watch Rocket Video’ And That’s Exactly What He Did — 2 Weeks Later They Got Engaged

Elon Musk has never followed the rules—whether it’s launching electric cars into orbit or, apparently, asking someone out.

Talulah Riley, the actress and author who married Musk not once but twice, recalled the quirky beginning of their relationship in a BBC documentary. Her first “romantic” invite? A hotel room screening of rocket videos.

“I remember one evening he said, ‘Would you like to come back to my hotel room so we can look at rocket videos?’ I said, ‘Hmm … OK, yeah,’” Riley recalled. “And we did get into his hotel room, and he did just show me rocket videos.”

Riley initially thought it was a euphemism. It wasn’t. Musk, the billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX, was dead serious.

Their courtship, like many things Musk touches, moved fast. In a resurfaced 2014 CBS interview, Riley said, “It all happened very fast. We were engaged after, I think, sorta two weeks of knowing each other.” At the time, she was just 22 and described Musk as “very charming” and “definitely the most interesting and eccentric person I have ever met.”

They married in 2010, divorced in 2012, remarried in 2013, and divorced again in 2016. Riley later told The Independent it just felt odd being with Musk without the formality of marriage. “It was like a habit.”

Despite the breakups, they stayed close. Riley received $4.2 million in the first divorce and another $16 million in the second—over $20 million in total. Yet the money didn’t break the bond. She even encouraged Musk to follow through with buying Twitter, privately urging him to close the deal.

In an August 2024 interview with The Times, Riley defended Musk’s often-criticized image, likening public perception to kayfabe—a wrestling term for staged performance. “What we read in the mainstream media is not necessarily an absolute truth,” she said.

Is Musk’s eccentric persona all part of the performance? Riley didn’t say definitively. “I loved/love the guy, so I’m incredibly subjective in my opinion, cannot be unbiased and shouldn’t be expected to be either,” she admitted. “I’m sure, well … you know what being in love is, right?”

Riley, who’s now married to actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster, says she wasn’t just tagging along during her time with Musk. She helped care for his five children and described it as a “family-wide effort.” And as she once put it, “It wasn’t like I was stuck in a mansion in Bel Air like a trophy wife.”

In the world of billionaires, few love lives are as unorthodox—or as oddly endearing—as Elon Musk’s.

Rocket launch