The ‘anti-love story’ of making a baby with Elon Musk

“He really wants smart people to have kids,” Shivon Zilis, an executive at Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, had told Musk’s biographer. “When she decided that she was ready,” the unauthorised biography continues, “he suggested that he be the sperm donor so that the kids would be genetically his.”That’s sort of what the point seems to be — lots of babies, his babies, and smart babies. So far, 53-year-old Musk is said to have had 14 babies with four women. And each story has some combination of the same elements built into it — secrecy, power imbalance, non-disclosure agreements, and a techno-futurist justification. And the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has now published the story of how it might go.Follow → DM → Proposition having a babyAshley St Clair is a 26-year-old conservative influencer. She had met Musk in 2023, after he followed her account on X (which used to be Twitter) and started engaging with her posts, WSJ reported. They started messaging each other on the platform, he asked her to come visit his office, and then they started dating. Barring that last part, of the relationship turning romantic, the sequence of interactions between Musk and the women he wants to have babies with is more or less the same, WSJ reported — he “interacts with lesser-known users”, replies to them, sends them direct messages, and then asks some of them if they want to have his babies. When St Clair and Musk had sex for the first time, WSJ wrote, Musk joked that they should “pick a name” for their child. Not the sort of thing people normally say the first time they hook up. St Clair already had a child, who used to have playdates with Musk’s younger children. He would keep talking about having children, St Clair told WSJ, and eventually, she did get pregnant. “He told her she should have 10 babies,” WSJ wrote. And he suggested that they “bring in other women to have even more of their children faster.”One text from Musk to St Clair, WSJ added, said, “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse, we will need to use surrogates.” mediumA quick aside: Why Musk feels he needs to “help” the underpopulation crisisPeople are not having enough babies, Musk has often said out loud. “I think babies are supercool and really people need to have more babies because, it sounds obvious, but if people don’t have enough babies, humanity will disappear,” he had told The New York Times.And in quiet corners, he says smart people are not having enough babies. Way back in 2009, The New Yorker wrote about the reason Musk wanted to have a lot of children: “he believes it’s the duty of the intelligent and educated to replicate, ‘so we don’t devolve into a not very literate, theocratic, and unenlightened future.’”The WSJ report adds that Musk has told people close to him that he is “concerned about what he called Third World countries having higher birthrates than the US and Europe”. And the way to change that is “for educated people to have more children.”He really believes in C-sectionsWhile St Clair was dating Musk, he was fighting a custody battle with Grimes, the 37-year-old musician-songwriter with whom he has three children, WSJ wrote. Those parallel lines of relationships and babies and court battles does not seem like a one-time thing. Musk’s biography talks about a time when a surrogate mother, carrying a baby Grimes and Musk were having, was in the hospital. A few rooms away lay Musk’s colleague Shivon Zilis, who was facing complications from her pregnancy with Musk’s child. Grimes didn’t know Zilis was nearby, or that she was having Musk’s baby. The biography also narrates Grimes’s horror when she realised that Musk had sent around photos of her C-section, when she was having the child who would be named X, to friends and family. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset,” the biography quoted Grimes as saying.Musk is, in fact, rather obsessed with C-sections. He has said that C-sections allow “for a larger brain, as brain size has historically been limited by birth canal diameter”. (When we ran his post through Grok, it said that “evidence is limited and mixed … but factors like nutrition and genetics likely play larger roles than delivery method.”)So, he “urged” St Clair to have the baby with a C-section and not have a vaginal birth. And he didn’t want the child to be circumcised, WSJ wrote. Because St Clair is Jewish, circumcisions are a part of religious prescription. She also decided against a C-section. mediumThe baby had to be a secretWhen St Clair’s pregnancy started showing, WSJ wrote, she started staying in so it wouldn’t be public knowledge. Musk set aside $2mn for her expenses, through whom WSJ calls Musk’s “longtime fixer” Jared Birchall. She used some of that money to pay for security, about $100,000 a month. Then, the time came. She was in the hospital, about to give birth. Birchall texted her — Musk’s name need not make it into the birth certificate, WSJ wrote. She agreed. When the baby was born, Birchall had another ask — that she sign an agreement to keep her relationship with Musk a secret. In exchange for $15mn and $100,000 a month until the baby turned 21.Musk justified the agreement to her by saying that revealing his relationship to the baby would endanger the child because he was “#2 after Trump for assassination”, WSJ wrote. This, she didn’t agree to. “One of the main sticking points, she said, was that it would make her son feel illegitimate,” WSJ wrote. And what if their child got seriously sick? Or Musk died before the baby turned 21? She wanted a paternity test, a basic requirement for child support agreements in New York, where she lives.But Birchall, apparently, told her that non-disclosure agreements are necessary. Because not signing an agreement “associated with handing over 15-plus million dollars is absolutely insane and irresponsible,” WSJ added. Birchall reportedly set up the secret property in Texas which, The New York Times reported last year, hosted the mothers of Musk’s many babies. mediumBut a tabloid found out anyway. Musk had begun to ignore her texts, WSJ wrote, when she tried to sort it out with him directly. When she realised the story would be public knowledge anyway, she pre-empted the story by posting about it this February. Musk, allegedly, rescinded the $15-mn offer four days after that. The support she had been getting dropped to $40,000 a month, and then to $20,000. Musk, meanwhile, maintained that he didn’t know if the child was his. When the court ordered that he must take a paternity test, the results showed that the “probability of paternity” was 99.9999%. Musk’s response? “TMZ >> WSJ,” he posted, comparing WSJ to the Fox-owned entertainment tabloid news organisation, hours after the story broke.Read WSJ’s full investigation into Musk’s legal threats to mothers of a few of his children here (paywalled).Read Teen Vogue’s interview with Musk’s eldest child who doesn’t “wish to be related to father in any way, shape or form.”