How should a tech writer deal with a loose-lipped genius like Elon Musk?

Half the time it seems like Musk is joking – but he’s been heavily sanctioned before for one of those so-called jokes. So what do we do when this man of the future starts making pronouncements we can’t make head nor tail of?

When Elon Musk announced this week that he was renaming a rocket, it was true to form. He sent a significant but mostly unexplained tweet, and left the world – and particularly the journalists like us who follow him – to try to decipher exactly what he meant.

The spacecraft previously known as the BFR (for “Big Falcon Rocket”, officially, but that middle word is usually taken to really refer to something more explicit) is now known as the Starship, he posted, and we had to work out the rest. Including whether to listen to him at all.

The strange thing is that even Musk doesn’t seem to be clear about how seriously to take himself: he jokes about the most serious aspects of his companies, and has a tendency to take seriously some of the most jokey propositions. It’s exactly the kind of venturous thinking that has made him take risks on space travel and electric cars, but it makes him a difficult person to cover as a journalist.