Elon Musk is known to have a complicated private life and confirmed the existence of another child just days after bringing along another one to the White House.
He’s known to have a difficult relationship with his dad, Errol Musk, and has fathered over 13 children.
Elon’s dad is a staunch pronatalist, a belief that reproduction is the primary function of humanity.
Errol once suggested that humans should be bred ‘like horses’ and has expressed views which have seen him accused of promoting eugenics – claims he strenuously denies.
This is an ideology which has also been adopted by Elon, with his posts on X that see him rant about ‘population collapse’ and lower birth rates leading to the crumbling of civilisation.
Errol has previously criticised Elon’s parenting skills on the Wide Awake podcast with Joshua Rubin.
‘No, he hasn’t been a good dad,’ Errol said. ‘The first child was too much with nannies and died in the care of a nanny… Elon’s gonna shoot me for saying this, but that’s what I think. That’s no good.
‘He had five children, each one had its own nanny… It was a weird situation,’ he later continued. ‘He didn’t spend enough time with them.’
Elon also once described Musk as a ‘terrible human being’ who has done ‘almost every evil thing you could possibly think of’.
Then there is the number of children that Elon has fathered over the years.
This week, conservative influencer Ashley St Clair announced she had given birth to yet another child of Musk’s in an X post on Friday night – believed to be his thirteenth.
‘Five months ago, I welcomed a new baby into the world. Elon Musk is the father,’ she wrote.
The firebrand conservative has previously authored an anti-woke children’s book about identity, and has faced criticism for hanging out with alleged white supremacists.
Prior to his tryst with St Clair, Musk had previously fathered 12 children with three different women; his ex-wife Justine Musk, the musician Claire Boucher aka Grimes, and Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis.
His first child, Nevada Alexander Musk, was born in 2002 but tragically died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome 10 weeks later. The couple later had twins, Griffin and Vivian, in 2004, and then a set of triplets, Kai, Saxon, and Damian, in 2006.
Vivian, who is transgender, has disowned Musk due to his transphobic rhetoric and refusal to accept her trans identity, and has accused him of being an absentee father and said she ‘no longer wishes to be related to him in any shape or form.’ She now goes by her mother’s maiden name of Wilson and claims her father is ‘dead’ to her.
Musk also has three children with Grimes, including four-year-old X Æ A-12, who was spotted at the White House last week – without his mother’s consent.
‘He should not be in public like this,’ Grimes wrote following the appearance. ‘I did not see this, thank u for alerting me. But I’m glad he was polite. Sigh.’
The former couple have two other children together, who also have unusual names; Exa Dark Sideræl, three, and Techno Mechanicus, two.
Grimes is currently engaged in a legal battle with Musk for custody of her children.
Shivon Zilis, a Canadian venture capitalist, has two children with Musk, Strider and Azure. The couple also welcomed a third child in 2024, though the name and gender have not been publicly disclosed.
Unlike Musk’s other paramore’s Zilis appears to have a better relationship with Musk, and the pair have been spotted together with their children in public.
Elon Musk has donated millions of dollars to fertility research, and is believed to have conceived multiple children through IVF.
It’s a policy which seems to have influenced Donald Trump, declared himself ‘the father of fertilisation’ and vowed to make IVF free for anyone who needs it on the campaign trail last year.
But there are concerns that Musk’s public and private support for pronatalism masks a more sinister agenda.
Philip Cohen, professor of sociology at Maryland University, told Sky News: ‘There’s some catastrophic thinking that goes on in the tech bro space of Silicon Valley and so on, and it’s usually not very practically oriented.’
‘If you really tried to promote pronatalism, inevitably what you end up doing is promoting a retrograde sort of anti-feminism.’
He added: ‘So it ends up being how can we convince women to have more children, which ends up being how can we have women out of the workforce, at home more, married younger, all the things that are sort of rolling back the progress that we made with regard to women’s equality in the last 100 years. And so that’s my primary concern.
‘The other is that it goes along with sort of a virulent nationalism that usually is not very far from racism and white supremacy.
‘The idea of not just more births, but a certain kind of births, a certain kind of family. And it has not led to good outcomes in modern society when right-wing governments try to promote higher birth rates.’
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