Meet Billy Evans, Elon Musk’s drug-addled date on the trial’s first day

Another person who has been riding on the coattails of the billionaire’s legal woes is boyfriend Billy Evans.

Another person who has been riding on the coattails of the billionaire’s legal woes is boyfriend Billy Evans.

Reuters

Who is Billy Evans?

William Richard Evans (not to be confused with Owen Mitchell, another former Musk colleague) is a 36-year-old Louisville man who Mr Musk brought on board in 2016 as part of his expansion into marijuana. Just this past April, he was one of the owners of LA’s Mission Buds, a cannabis retailer responsible for the launch of Musk’s own forthcoming Los Angeles area business venture.

Is he a friend of Mr Musk’s?

As a reporter with Bloomberg revealed, Evans is not a friend at all: he is a business-connected investor with connections to Tesla. (Mr Musk listed Evans’ home address as the one for the factory when he stated there was a no-trespassing order against a different Tesla employee he’d fired in April this year.)

Does that make Evans some sort of unwitting participant in Mr Musk’s drug- and sex-related shenanigans?

A possible answer to that question comes from SpaceX’s website, where it states that “whenever Elon needs a support employee, he can make use of the SpaceX network of support services that he can tap into. If you’re interested in working at SpaceX, send us a resume.”

The way it reads may have given many people some idea of Evans’s role at Tesla, but Musk’s own denial made it clear that Evans was no Tesla employee. Despite that, he still chose Evans as his date for the first public entry he made in the Manhattan Supreme Court.

It’s likely that Evans’ role at Tesla will fade over time, and the question is: how much will the ongoing court case impact his role in the company? Is it possible that the relationship between Mr Musk and Mr Evans won’t be as smooth as anyone hoped?

Reuters

Who is Elon Musk?

Despite starting from the lowest of the low-tech manufacturing levels, he went on to create Tesla (named for a fictional humanoid who developed the technology to run a civilisation without human influence), SpaceX, and now a host of other companies, including the transportation ferry service “Extra” and a railroad company called the Boring Company.

At various points, he has been classified as the richest man in America, though he was ranked second (after Bill Gates) as of August 2018. To put that into perspective, Forbes says he is worth $19.5bn (£13.3bn), with $6.1bn (£4.4bn) in liquid assets. For perspective, Walt Disney is the most famous and successful non-fictional billionaire in the world, worth $62.5bn (£50.6bn) as of October this year.

Leave a Comment