The awkward context hanging over our conversation is this: A couple of weeks earlier, on a Tesla-related trip to Germany, Musk gave an interview to a German newspaper, Handelsblatt. The resulting article was published a few days before we speak, and toward its end came the following exchange, which related to Apple's rumored move into car design and manufacturing:

Apple just hired some of Tesla's most important engineers. Do you have to worry about a new competitor?

Important engineers? They have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the "Tesla Graveyard." If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding.

Do you take Apple's ambitions seriously?

Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch? (laughs) No, seriously: It's good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can't just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.

Musk's remarks flew around the world's media, and they were generally portrayed in the least attractive way: as though Musk had declared war on Apple. In response, he attempted to explain and contextualize his statements on Twitter: "Yo, I don't hate Apple. It's a great company with a lot of talented people. I love their products and I'm glad they're doing an EV...Regarding the watch, Jony & his team created a beautiful design, but the functionality isn't compelling yet. By version 3, it will be." This didn't seem to help much. (One subsequent newspaper headline: Elon Musk tries to take back Apple insults, ends up insulting Apple again.) He complains to me now that the quotes in his German interview were taken and used "as though I issued a press release or something… I have no interest in sort of attacking Apple."

But, I say to him, while it was clearly something you might wish you hadn't said, presumably it was a true reflection of your thoughts?

"You know, it's better if I don't say anything on this front," he says. "My point is, there's no upside in generating animosity. It's not that I care about currying favor with Apple or anything like that, but I don't care to generate animosity."

One final observation about Tesla's view of Apple: Tesla has established a tradition—well, for the last two years, anyway—of announcing a fake product update on its blog on April 1. In 2014, they apprised their customers on the subject of "Pet Driving Cars," a post illustrated by a montage of two sweet giant-sized kittens clawing out of the roof of a Model S on an oceanside highway; the text reported Tesla's conclusion that cats "had an inexplicable propensity to drive off a cliff," with dogs faring not much better, but that "a goldfish-driving car" offered "the best path forward."

This year's joke was simpler:

"Tesla today announced a whole new product line called the Model W. As many in the media predicted, it's a watch. That's what the 'W' stands for. This incredible new device from Tesla doesn't just tell the time, it also tells the date…This will change your life. Reality as you know it will never be the same."

At the end of September, I watched Musk launch the latest real Tesla product, the SUV known as the Model X, in a giant hangar space close to the main Tesla production plant in Fremont, California. Many hundreds of hyped-up Tesla owners, and owners-to-be, were crowded on the floor. At the very front, behind a thin rope, were a few VIPs on fold-out seats, including Sergey Brin from Google, who would be one of the first five owners to receive their Model X tonight. In the row next to the stage were two of Musk's boys (he has twin 11-year-olds and triplet 9-year-olds)—the other three would have roles in the presentation, demonstrating how much luggage could fit in the car and how a bike rack could easily be fitted at the back. One of the two sons sitting in front of me whiled away the time reading a book as we all waited for Musk's delayed presentation: a book written in childish hand-lettering but that, in an almost impossibly appropriate way, appeared to be demonstrating quite sophisticated scientific principles—the chapter he was looking at, improbably, was titled "Other Orbits."

Talulah Riley and Elon Musk arrive at the 2014 Vanity Fair Oscars party on March 2, 2014.

At the end of the same row was Musk's mother, Maye, enjoying her own late-life career as an over-sixties model, and next to the boys was Musk's second wife, the British actress Talulah Riley. Perhaps it would be impossible to imagine that someone as driven and singular as Musk could be anything other than a strange person to live with. This perception was certainly fed by the extensive and fairly unguarded blog his novelist first wife, Justine, wrote during and after their marriage, but Musk himself hasn't always excelled at giving a different impression. During a 2012 Bloomberg Businessweek interview, at a time when he was single, he mused to journalist Ashlee Vance, in a quote that may have been a clear-headed reflection on the practicalities of his life but that is also perhaps one of the least romantic dating pitches of all time: "I think the time allocated to the businesses and the kids is going fine. I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. How much time does a woman want a week? Maybe ten hours?" And Musk's history with Riley certainly hasn't been straightforward. They married in 2010, then announced a divorce settlement in 2012, then remarried in 2013, then at the end of 2014 announced a second divorce settlement. No further public updates have been made, but the fact that the two of them have started appearing together again—at the Cannes Film Festival in May; taking turns wing walking on a biplane in the U.K. in August; her presence here, one of his sons resting his head on her lap—suggests that the second divorce has been no more successful than the first.

The particular way Musk does product launches makes these events unlike any others you've ever seen. Though he has an idiosyncratic charisma, he's not a natural showman, and there are few signs that he has carefully rehearsed and honed a script. He's clearly confident, despite the hesitations and the endless "um"s and the strange cough-laugh he uses as a kind of diffident pause, but there's also something breathlessly unsophisticated about the way he speaks—in some ways he's more like a teenager who's been asked to stand up and speak at a family dinner than like a titan of industry. There's also the occasional sense that he's pausing so much not because he's trying to work out what to say, but what not to, as if he's working out how to translate what's in his head so that the normal people of Earth might understand it.

He's also got a delightfully weird sense of humor and sense of timing. On this day, I see him present the car twice—first to a small group of automotive and tech journalists, second at this big event. He hits different notes at each presentation. For the journalists, when talking about the car's distinctive Falcon Wing doors, he explains how he was so determined that these doors opened and rose up balletically that he actually had the engineers watch ballet. Then he explains, almost apologetically, that they probably got a bit carried away with some features. "I'm not sure anybody really should make this car…there is a lot more there than is necessary to sell the car," he says. "This is definitely the most complex sun visor in history—we probably shouldn't have done that…There's never been a car like it. I'm not sure there should be. It's a car from the future." For the bigger crowd, he is a little more theatrical, bringing the house down when he shows how the driver's door automatically opens when you walk toward it and then closes behind you when you get in. "Like an invisible chauffeur," he explains.