Elon Musk Provides
for His Many Children from Multiple Wives
As the billionaire warns of
population collapse and the moral obligation to have children, he’s navigating
his own complicated family.
[ABS News Service/30.10.2024]
On a quiet, leafy street of multimillion-dollar
properties, one stands out: a 14,400-square-foot mansion that looks like a
villa plucked from the hills of Tuscany and transplanted to Austin, Texas.
This is where Elon Musk, 53, the
world’s richest man and perhaps the most important campaign backer of former
President Donald J. Trump, has been trying to establish the cornerstone of an
unusual family compound, according to four people familiar with his plans.
Mr. Musk has told people close to
him in recent months that he envisions his children (of which there are at
least 11) and two of their three mothers occupying adjoining properties. That
way, his younger children could be a part of one another’s lives, and Mr. Musk
could schedule time among them.
Directly behind the villa is a
six-bedroom mansion that Mr. Musk helped purchase, according to two of the
people and public records. The total cost of both properties was about $35
million. When in Austin, he often stays at a third mansion about a 10-minute
walk away, the people said.
Three mansions, three mothers, 11
children and one secretive, multibillionaire father who obsesses about
declining birthrates when he isn’t overseeing one of
his six companies: It is an unconventional family situation, and one that Mr.
Musk seems to want to make even bigger.
A proponent of in vitro
fertilization, Mr. Musk believes strongly in increasing the world’s population.
He has even offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances, including the
former independent vice-presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, according to
two people familiar with his offer. Ms. Shanahan turned him down.
Mr. Musk has tried to keep his
own growing family a secret. The compound, and his efforts to fill it with his
children, which have not been previously reported, isn’t just a personal matter
for him; it is rooted in the existential anxieties that underpin his business
empire.
He was an early investor in his
electric car company, Tesla, out of concerns about reliance on fossil fuels. He
founded his rocket company, SpaceX, now a significant government contractor, so
that he could colonize Mars for humans in case Earth becomes uninhabitable.
Over the last two years, he has
become increasingly fixated on what he sees as another threat: declining birthrates. He believes a global population collapse is
coming that will wipe out humanity. His apocalyptic vision is unlikely,
according to demographers, but on X, the social media company he owns, he has
been encouraging followers to have as many children as possible.
“It should be considered a
national emergency to have kids,” Mr. Musk posted in June.
For the moment, Mr. Musk is
temporarily encamped in Pennsylvania, immersed in the presidential campaign and
spending tens of millions of dollars to finance Mr. Trump’s get-out-the-vote
operations. A Trump victory could make Mr. Musk perhaps the most powerful
private citizen in the country, and Mr. Trump has already said he would appoint
the billionaire to oversee an “efficiency commission” to scrutinize the
workings of the entire federal government.
But it is in Texas where Mr. Musk
has moved much of his business operations and is trying to establish his family
compound. The compound is off to a bumpy start.
One of the mothers, Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink,
Mr. Musk’s brain technology start-up, has moved into one of the homes with her
children. But Claire Boucher, the musician better known as Grimes, who is the
mother to three of his children, is in a protracted legal fight with Mr. Musk
and has so far steered clear.
The third mother is Mr. Musk’s
first wife, Justine Musk, with whom he has five living children, all in their
late teens or older. There is room in the Austin compound if they were to
visit, though he is estranged from at least one of those children.
In choosing Senator JD Vance as
his running mate, Mr. Trump brought declining birthrates
to the forefront of this year’s presidential election. Mr. Vance, who has raised
alarms about the issue, made headlines for scolding “childless cat ladies.” Mr.
Musk’s push for procreation also aligns globally with world leaders like Prime
Minister Giorgia Meloni of
Italy and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and
has made him something of a hero among pronatalists,
who believe people should have as many children as possible.
In a biography published in 2015,
Mr. Musk worried that educated people weren’t having enough children. “I’m not
saying like only smart people should have kids. I’m just saying that smart
people should have kids as well,” he said. “I notice that a lot of really smart
women have zero or one kid. You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s probably not good.’”
His views seem to echo those of
his father, Errol Musk. The elder Mr. Musk, who is 78 and has seven children
with three women, praised his son’s “good genes” and desire to have many children.
“You breed horses,” Errol Musk
said in an interview in September. “People are the same. If you have a good
father and a good mother, you’ll have exceptional children. If you have no
children, I feel very sorry for you.”
In a book published in 2023, Elon
Musk told his biographer that he and his father, who lives in South Africa, are
sometimes estranged, partly because Errol Musk had two children with his own
former stepdaughter. But the elder Mr. Musk said that he and his son were in
frequent contact and that he had recently traveled to
Texas to visit him and his children.
“I haven’t met one or two of them
because they’re still secret,” the elder Mr. Musk said.
Mr. Musk, his attorney and the
head of his family office did not return requests for comment. Representatives
for Ms. Boucher did not return requests for comment. Ms. Zilis and Ms. Shanahan
also did not return requests for comment.
Mr. Musk and his first wife,
Justine Musk, had their first child, a boy named Nevada, in 2002, two years
after they married. The child died unexpectedly in infancy.
“Elon made it clear that he did
not want to talk about Nevada’s death,” Justine Musk wrote in a 2010 essay. “I
didn’t understand this, just as he didn’t understand why I grieved openly.” Ms.
Musk wrote that she coped by “making my first visit to an I.V.F. clinic less
than two months later.”
The couple had five children
using I.V.F. before they divorced in 2008: twins, Griffin and Vivian, who are
now 20, followed by triplets, Saxon, Damian and Kai, now in their late teens.
Mr. Musk has said that I.V.F. is a more efficient way of having children
because it allows parents to control parts of the process, according to a
person who understands his thinking.
By 2016, as the head of Tesla and
SpaceX, Mr. Musk had amassed a net worth of more than $11 billion, according to
Forbes. That year, he warned for the first time on Twitter, the social network
now known as X, that the world could be headed for population collapse.
“Consequences of population
implosion greatly underestimated,” he wrote in response to an article about
falling birthrates. In private, he had warned of the
issue to his friends and family for years.
He twice married and divorced the
actress Talulah Riley, whose desire to focus on her
career instead of having children was a factor in their breakup, according to
three people familiar with her thinking. Representatives for Ms. Riley didn’t
return requests for comment.
In 2020, Mr. Musk and Ms. Boucher,
whom he started dating two years earlier, had their first child, a son they
named X Æ A-Xii, or X for short.
He started becoming even more
vocal about the declining population. “Population collapse is 2nd biggest
danger to civilization after AI,” he tweeted in July 2020, a couple of months
after X’s birth.
Over the next few years, Mr. Musk
had more children with Ms. Boucher as well as with Ms. Zilis. The arrangement
created tensions that sometimes flared on social media.
In 2021, without Ms. Boucher’s
knowledge, Mr. Musk donated sperm to Ms. Zilis, who became pregnant with twins
through I.V.F., according to three people familiar with the couple. That same
year, the billionaire and Ms. Boucher were expecting a second child also
conceived via I.V.F. but carried by a surrogate.
The two women, who had been
friends and ran in similar social circles, had unknowingly been at the same
Austin hospital around the same time, according to an authorized biography of
Mr. Musk by Walter Isaacson. Ms. Zilis had twins in late 2021, weeks before Ms.
Boucher’s child, a girl, was born. Ms. Boucher found out that Mr. Musk had
fathered Ms. Zilis’s children a month after they were born, according to two
people close to the situation.
Further complicating matters, Mr.
Musk took a name that he and Ms. Boucher had chosen for their daughter —
Valkyrie — and gave it to one of Ms. Zilis’s twins, according to two people
familiar with the naming. Ms. Boucher was so offended that she wrote a song
about the episode, which she posted to Twitter.
“A girl cursed with my daughter’s
name,” Ms. Boucher wrote in a now-deleted tweet, “will now carry her mother’s
shame.” (In the end, Ms. Zilis changed her daughter’s name, while Ms. Boucher
chose a different name for her child.)
By then, Ms. Boucher was living
in Austin and co-parenting her children with Mr. Musk. Ms. Zilis was also
living in the city, according to three people close to her.
Both women, at times, have
treated Mr. Musk as their romantic partner, and backed his beliefs about a population
crisis and having children to save humanity.
“I’ve spent most of my adult life
working on what I figured would most contribute to a better future within the
aperture of my skill set, but having kids makes it non-negotiably
and viscerally obligatory to fight for that goal,” Ms. Zilis posted on X in
March.
Over the last three years, Mr.
Musk has ratcheted up his alarm over the declining birthrate
across the United States and elsewhere. In 2021, his foundation gave $10
million to the University of Texas to study fertility and population trends. He
has posted at least 67 times on the subject since 2021, 33 of them in the last
year.
“I’m doing my best to encourage
more people to become parents and ideally have three or more kids, so humanity
can grow,” he posted in February.
Mr. Musk has been celebrated by
supporters of the growing pronatalist movement. While pronatalists
on the Christian right believe children should be conceived through traditional
marriages between a man and a woman, Silicon Valley adherents accept a wide
array of family structures as well as reproductive technology like I.V.F.
Simone and Malcolm Collins, who
founded the Pronatalist Foundation in 2021, have come to the movement from
worry about demographic collapse and applaud what Ms. Collins called Silicon
Valley’s “thinking about the future in a clearer way.” A married couple with
four children, they said they were working for the betterment of humankind.
“Our worldview value is based
around the goal of an eventual pluralistic intergalactic human civilization,”
Mr. Collins said.
Few demographers believe the
planet will face a catastrophic demographic event in the next few decades. The
United Nations said in July that the global population, which is now eight
billion, is expected to grow by two billion over the next 60 years, and then
gradually fall by about 700 million people.
Nonetheless, a number of
developed countries like Japan, Italy and Germany have been struggling to
increase population as they face the economic consequences of a declining birthrate, like a shrinking work force and the costs of
caring for the elderly.
“There is an awful morality to
those who deliberately have no kids: they are effectively demanding that other
people’s kids take care of them in their old age,” Mr. Musk posted on X in
2023, in response to a video of dual-income couples bragging about having no
children.
These trends have alarmed other
global tech figures. The Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars
to the Collinses’ foundation and is himself a father
of five. The founder of the messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov,
claimed in July that he had fathered more than 100 biological children through
sperm donation. Mr. Durov, who is under arrest in
France over charges of allowing criminal activity on Telegram, has said he
plans to “open source” his DNA.
Mr. Musk, too, has offered to
share his DNA. At a dinner party held at the home of a well-known Silicon
Valley executive last year, Mr. Musk offered to provide his sperm to a married
couple he had met socially only a handful of times, according to two people who
were present for the interaction.
The couple had mentioned at the
dinner that they were having trouble conceiving a child. Mr. Musk told them he
was happy to assist, and boasted about his many children, according to the
people present.
In the winter of 2022, Mr. Musk
made a similar suggestion to Ms. Shanahan around the time that Ms. Shanahan told
people she had sex with Mr. Musk. (Ms. Shanahan has denied that she had an
affair with Mr. Musk.)
The former running mate of Robert
F. Kennedy Jr., Ms. Shanahan has a daughter with her former husband, the Google
co-founder Sergey Brin. She declined Mr. Musk’s offer.
Initially, Mr. Musk had hoped to
build a compound for his families on hundreds of acres that he and his
companies owned outside Austin, near Tesla’s headquarters, according to four
people familiar with the plans. But that idea appeared to fall apart after the
Justice Department began investigating whether Tesla’s resources had been used
on a secret effort to build a glass house for Mr. Musk’s personal use,
according to The Wall Street Journal.
In August
2023, Mr. Musk said he was “not building a house of any kind,” in a post on X.
By that
time, Mr. Musk had begun touring Austin for homes that could fit his growing
families but was having trouble with at least one of the mothers of his
children.
He had
been living with Ms. Boucher in a 6,900-square-foot house on a small
cul-de-sac, according to three people familiar with the couple, when the pair
welcomed a third child, a son born via surrogate.
Mr. Musk
wanted to buy property next to the one he lived in with Ms. Boucher so that he
could create a private compound and incorporate more of his children.
But Ms.
Boucher, who once described her relationship with Mr. Musk as “very fluid,”
moved out in the summer of 2023. She eventually left Austin amid a custody
battle with Mr. Musk, according to three people familiar with her move.
Still Mr.
Musk continued his home purchase spree. He offered some homeowners 20 to 70
percent above the value of their houses, according to those homeowners. Some
were required to sign nondisclosure agreements just to see the offer, according
to three people familiar with the agreements.
It’s unclear which members of Mr.
Musk’s families will live in those homes. Some of his oldest children aren’t
close to their father, including his daughter Vivian, who is transgender. In an
interview, Mr. Musk said Vivian was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.”
Vivian, for her part, accused Mr. Musk of pretending to care about his
children. “You are not a family man,” she wrote on Threads in August. She
declined to comment.
Only Ms. Zilis is currently
living in Austin, where she is sometimes seen at events around the city, three
people familiar with her said. In June, Mr. Musk confirmed to The New York Post
that he had a third child with Ms. Zilis after Bloomberg reported on the
child’s existence.
When Mr. Musk is in town, neighbors, including some who haven’t met him, say they can
tell when someone is home because of the extra security stationed out front.
Sometimes, they see a pet groomer pick up a small dog.
The neighbors
say they don’t know why Mr. Musk chose the neighborhood
when he clearly values privacy. The area is densely populated and the community
is not gated.
“I just
keep thinking with that much money, he’s probably got lots of whims and he’ll
do something else soon,” said Jim Lewis, a retired rancher who lives near the
house where Mr. Musk stays.
In
September, the pop star Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president,
signing her Instagram post “Childless Cat Lady.” Mr. Musk posted on X, “Fine
Taylor…you win…I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”
People
close to Mr. Musk believe he was only half joking.