On day three of the mission to rescue the Wild Boars, the youth soccer team that was trapped inside a system of flooded caves in Thailand, Elon Musk arrived on the scene, flanked by a team of engineers from Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring Company, his tunnel-construction venture. Urged on by his Twitter fans — not by the Thai authorities actually organizing the rescue mission — Musk’s team had been working, feverishly, on a couple of high-tech rescue options. One was an inflatable, pressure-controlled pouch that a boy could slip inside of and, theoretically, be carried out with by the trained divers. At the suggestion of a Twitter user, the team added a pocket in the wall to accommodate a phone or music player because, as Musk tweeted, “Music makes things better.” The other was a miniature submarine, Musk noted, “made of rocket parts.”

Musk’s team created the would-be rescue pods quickly — “we started with a concept at 8 AM and had a prototype in the pool being tested the same day,” Andrew Branagh, the CEO of Wing Inflatables, a supplier for SpaceX, told Wired. But any engineering resourcefulness was soon overshadowed. Musk flew the inventions to Thailand and tweeted up a storm from the cave system, but ultimately the divers freed the trapped boys without using Musk’s devices. When, in the aftermath of the rescue, one of the divers said that Musk’s inventions were impractical and dismissed Musk’s whole undertaking as “a PR stunt,” the billionaire fired back, randomly and petulantly, calling the man a “pedo guy.”

The shape of Musk’s Thailand narrative will be especially unsurprising to readers of Christian Davenport’s new book The Space Barons, which tracks the efforts over the last two decades of Musk and his fellow space-company-owning billionaires, Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), Paul Allen (Stratolaunch), and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic).