If you want to skip lunch today, I would suggest reading this absolutely bonkers Wall Street Journal piece on Elon Musk and his stable of baby-mothers. Every part of it is stomach-churning, from Musk’s white-supremacist ideology and language, to his creepy “pronatalist” beliefs to how he actually treats the women who agree to have his children. He’s also a total creep when he approaches women online and asks them to have his children and they refuse. Some highlights from this deeply disturbing WSJ piece:
Ashley St. Clair had to negotiate everything through Musk’s longtime fixer, Jared Birchall. “I don’t want my son to feel like he’s a secret,” St. Clair told Birchall in a two-hour phone call in December. Birchall offered St. Clair some advice. His boss was a “very big-hearted, kind and generous person,” he said. But Musk had a different side. When a mother of his child goes “the legal route” in these discussions, “that always, always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise,” Birchall told the 26-year-old. Plus, he said, Musk wasn’t sure the child was his.
Musk probably has more kids than we know: Behind the scenes, Birchall also manages the financial and privacy deals Musk wants for the women raising the world’s richest man’s babies. Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known.
The deal offered to St. Clair: Musk offered St. Clair $15 million and $100,000 a month in support in exchange for her silence about the child, whom they named Romulus. Similar agreements had been negotiated with other mothers of Musk’s children, Birchall told St. Clair.
The Musk Legion: Musk refers to his offspring as a “legion,” a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire. During St. Clair’s pregnancy, Musk suggested that they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.”
He pursued right-wing women on Twitter: He has recruited potential mothers on his social-media platform X, according to some of the people. Musk has used his wealth to buy the silence of some women who have his kids, according to St. Clair as well as other people, text messages and documents reviewed by the Journal. Nondisclosure clauses are part of some of the payment agreements. If the mothers push back or seek outside counsel, Musk’s advisers, including Birchall, have threatened financial retribution, according to the documents and people.
Musk is worried about the decline in white birthrates: Separately, Musk has said he is concerned about what he called Third World countries having higher birthrates than the U.S. and Europe, a person familiar with the conversation said. One of the most important ways to change these dynamics, he has repeatedly told people close to him, is for educated people to have more children.
The Tiffany Fong situation: Cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong was covering disgraced crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall when Musk started liking and replying to her posts. Musk’s interactions ramped up as Fong posted more political content in support of Trump, and Musk followed her last summer. That sort of attention from Musk on X, where he has 219 million followers, sent droves of followers to Fong, which was a financial boon. More engagement meant more earnings for her as part of a revenue-sharing program for creators on X. During the height of her interactions with the billionaire owner, Fong earned $21,000 on the platform in a two-week period in November, according to a screenshot she posted. That was about when Musk sent her a direct message asking if she was interested in having his child, according to people familiar with the matter. The two had never met in person.
Fong didn’t go through with it: Fong didn’t move forward with Musk because she pictured having children in a more traditional nuclear family, but confided to a few friends about the approach—including St. Clair, whom she knew as another conservative social-media figure—and how she worried that turning him down could hurt her earnings. Once Musk learned that Fong disclosed the request to others, he chided her for not using discretion, according to the people, and unfollowed her. That contributed to a fall in her engagement, and her earnings declined.
Musk & St. Clair actually had a relationship: The first time they had sex, Musk joked that they should “pick a name” for their future child. He frequently talked to her about having children, she said. It was months later on a New Year’s trip to St. Barts, that she told him that she was ovulating. He asked her “what are we waiting for?” and the two conceived their son on that trip, St. Clair said. While she was pregnant, Musk had urged her to deliver the baby via caesarean section and told her he didn’t want the child to be circumcised. (Musk has posted on X that vaginal births limit brain size and that C-sections allow for larger brains.) St. Clair is Jewish and circumcisions are an important ritual in the religion, and she decided against a C-section. He told her she should have 10 babies, and they debated the child’s middle name.
The offer made to St. Clair, which she didn’t sign: The agreement prevented her from speaking about Musk in relation to the child or disparaging him, but didn’t bar Musk from speaking negatively about her if he wanted. St. Clair would have to pay back the $15 million lump sum if she broke the agreement. One of the main sticking points, she said, was that it would make her son feel illegitimate. The agreement didn’t provide support for their child if he became gravely ill or a trust fund or life insurance if Musk died before the child turned 21. The agreement would also not have an allotment for security expenses.
Let’s call it what it is: Elon Musk is a rich weirdo who harasses, threatens, bribes and pays off women because he sees procreation as entirely transactional. He’s solely interested in spreading his seed and he has no actual interest in raising children or spending time with his kids or their mothers. His priority is simply “more white and Asian children” and he’ll spend millions of dollars to make it happen. *shudder*
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, screengrab from PBS, Avalon Red.
