“Everyone should have one talent. What’s yours?” asks Dickie Greenleaf, played by Jude Law in the 1999 film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. “Telling lies, forging signatures, and impersonating almost anybody,” Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley replies. “That’s three,” Greenleaf counters. “Nobody should have more than one talent.”

Elon Musk, like the fictional Ripley, has many talents. The drama of his life, merely exaggerated during a very eventful quarantine, works like that of the antihero in Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant reverse-murder Ripley mystery series. In a normal murder mystery, you know that, somehow, the crime is going to get solved, and the tension is in trying to determine how so before the plot reveals the solution. In Highsmith, the walls are always closing in, but Tom Ripley always gets away with it somehow.