(Toru Hanai/Reuters) Elon Musk.

Google CEO and cofounder Larry Page is quite friendly with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

Musk is close enough to Page to feel comfortable asking him for a place to stay when he visits Silicon Valley.

And Musk is among the few who get to visit Google's secret apartment in downtown Palo Alto, according to Ashlee Vance's new book, "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future."

Page and fellow Google cofounder Sergey Brin sometimes meet with Musk to talk about technology, transportation, and more in this private location, Vance writes. Google even has its own chef on call to come prepare food for guests who are allowed into this apartment.

George Zachary, a venture capitalist and friend of Musk, was present for one of these meetings and described it to Vance saying the following:

I was there once, and Elon was talking about building an electric jet plane that can take off and land vertically. Larry said the plane should be able to land on ski slopes, and Sergey said it needed to be able to dock at a port in Manhattan. Then they started talking about building a commuter plane that was always circling the Earth, and you'd hop up to it and get places incredibly fast. I thought everyone was kidding, but at the end I asked Elon, 'Are you really going to do that?' And he said, 'Yes.'

The apartment is in one of the taller buildings in downtown Palo Alto and offers views of the mountains surrounding Stanford University's campus, the authorized biography says. It's during such meetings at Google's secretive apartment that Musk, Page, and Brin begin to brainstorm ideas that turn into projects.

"It's kind of our recreation, I guess," Page told Vance. "It's fun for the three of us to talk about kind of crazy things, and we find stuff that eventually turns out to be real. We go through hundreds or thousands of possible things before arriving at the ones that are most promising."

Vance's book, which comes out May 19, is full of anecdotes and quotes like these, which provide some color on Musk's life and character.

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