There are other ways of understanding Musk, of course, and the series pokes and prods at them. His mother Maye, a model and entrepreneur, has a one-line explanation for everything Elon. “He’s a genius,” she says with a pride that’s as blinding as it is understandable.

Ex-wife Talulah Riley – the British actress Musk married in 2010, divorced in 2012, re-married in 2013 and divorced again in 2016 – describes someone with the ability to be tender and thoughtful but who was more often than not distracted and stuck on whatever problem he needed to solve. And in the early days, there were many.

“Tesla was the problem child,” she says. His other pet project, SpaceX, almost sapped every last penny of the $250 million he made when eBay bought PayPal, the company from which he’d been ousted as CEO, in 2002. Then, on the fourth and final attempt, it finally launched a rocket that didn’t crash, and won a massive NASA contract.

“It was the first thing that went right,” says Riley. “Elon went from being ridiculed to suddenly his word was gospel.”

It was the making of him, and the unmaking. As someone else observes, “fame does not agree with Elon”. The Twitter debacle, the dabbling in politics, the stockmarket manipulation (whether deliberate or inadvertent), all get a look-in.

The show starts by posing the question it will attempt to answer: Should we celebrate his achievements or be frightened of his power? I’m not sure that it ever arrives at a definitive answer. But it’s a question we should all be asking regardless.

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