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In today’s edition, my reporting on the vast, eccentric history of Elon Musk’s wealth. When placed side-by-side with his billionaire brethren, many of the (likely) soon-to-be-minted Twitter owner’s financial quirks are as idiosyncratic as the man himself. What is Elon telling friends privately about the deal? How is he so comfortable with so much debt? Is he really going to finance Twitter himself, or is he going to rope in some of his wealthy, conservative friends, too? My reporting, below the fold.

Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, and the mega-confident impulsiveness with which he pulled together the financing, is the latest example of this trademark chutzpah. My partner Bill Cohan has written about the extraordinary risk that Musk is taking on, leveraging his Tesla stock so close to the bone in order to finance $12.5 billion of his Twitter bid. This fits a larger biographical pattern of economic cliff-jumping, often without looking: at the age of 27, according to Ashlee Vance’s biography, Musk took $12 million of the $22 million in proceeds that he got from selling his first company, Zip2, and immediately funneled it into starting his second, what eventually became PayPal. A few years later, Musk took the $180 million he made post-tax from selling PayPal and immediately flipped $100 million into starting SpaceX. As one Musk friend told me last week, “He’s doubled and tripled down on his prior companies when it was financially imprudent to do so.” This bet-the-farm mentality has only added to his legend.

Legend doesn’t pay the bills, though...