The Harem of Elon Musk

Fatherhood looms large in the MAGA imagination: Warming up crowds at a rally last year for Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson characterized the president as a disciplinarian dad incensed at the country’s decline—“When Dad gets home, you know what he says?” Carlson asked. “‘You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.” Likewise, one popular brand of Trump-themed merchandise features the slogan Daddy’s Home. Trump’s supporters tend to imagine him fulfilling a conservative version of fatherhood, where the role is associated with domination and authoritarian discipline. But the Republican Party now has a very different vision of fatherhood to offer, courtesy of Elon Musk.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, Musk is constantly scanning the horizon for new potential mothers for his children, using everything from X interactions and DMs to huge cash incentives to entice would-be incubators, whom he requires to sign legally binding payment agreements with nondisclosure clauses. As a result, Musk has an undisclosed number of children that is likely well above the 14 already publicly known, and he’s shown no obvious intention to stop sowing his seed. But perhaps more interesting than the presence of contracts between Musk and his harem of mothers is the apparent absence of traditional family ties. He appears to acknowledge few, if any, bonds of genuine duty and responsibility among family members, much less bonds of care or love. Musk seems to have reduced traditional family relationships to mere financial arrangements, undermining longtime conservative agreement around the importance of family.

There is a difference, after all, between being pro-natalist and being pro-family. Musk is by now infamous for his interest in raising the birth rate, which appears to be driven by his belief that a catastrophic global population collapse is imminent, as well as by his view that intelligent people in particular ought to be breeding more. (“He really wants smart people to have kids,” Shivon Zilis, Musk’s most favored concubine, told a biographer.) His eugenic bent makes him the most prominent member of the pro-natalist movement’s techno-libertarian wing, which aims to breed genetically superior offspring and which exists alongside and in tension with the traditionalist approach to pro-natalism. The divide in the movement is real: tech versus trad, future versus past, reproduction versus family. And although the trads are largely drawn from the conservative Christian base that once animated the Republican Party, it’s the tech people, like Musk, who have more resources and power to market their ideology.

[Read: Why the left should embrace pro-natalism]

But even eager fans of Musk’s reproductive philosophy won’t be able to replicate the scale of his bloodline empire, because Musk is especially well positioned to use money to fund and structure his preferred familial arrangements, effectively reducing those relationships to a vulgar cash nexus. Musk’s latest consort, the conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, told The Wall Street Journal’s Dana Mattioli that Musk had offered her a $15 million lump sum, as well as $100,000 per month for living expenses—if she was willing to sign a contract that would require her to keep their arrangement secret. People familiar with Musk’s habits, Mattioli reported, said that this is a well-established practice for the billionaire, who threatens women financially if they hire an attorney or go public: In St. Clair’s case, Musk terminated his proposed $15 million payment and lowered her recurring payments to $40,000 a month (which, it’s fair to note, is still a lavish income) as the two went to court over paternity testing for their child.

“The timing of the reduction in payments from him are timed with disagreements on testing and gag orders,” Dror Bikel, one of St. Clair’s attorneys, told Mattioli, adding that “the only conclusion we can make is that money is being weaponized.” Money appears to be the only means by which Musk can persuade people who are not actually intimate with him and whose preferences and needs are not of much concern to him. Fatherhood, for Musk, ends with conception, except for lingering payouts. There is no discernible sense of mutual duty or responsibility between Musk and his children or between Musk and his children’s mothers, and no expectation of growth in such bonds or fulfillment in them either: A Musk aide told St. Clair that Zilis “goes in and out of finding contentment,” and that Grimes, another mother of Musk’s children, isn’t “ever going to find true happiness.”

That isn’t surprising—Musk’s family values seem similarly detached from the usual ties of familial love. According to Mattioli, Musk instigates what St. Clair called “harem drama” by lending some of his babies’ mothers, such as Zilis, special status both financially and socially, while others, such as St. Clair, struggle to get so much as responses to their texts, or, in Grimes’s case, their desperate X posts. Likewise, he takes an active interest in some of his children—such as X Æ A-Xii, his toddler son with Grimes, whom he totes to public appearances and state events—more than others. He refused to have his name on the birth certificate of St. Clair’s son, and is estranged from his daughter Vivian altogether. Although past generations of conservatives have hailed family as a “haven in a heartless world,” Musk’s relationships with his children and their mothers seem defined instead by a capitalist-inflected competition; Musk’s “entire world is set up to be, like, a meritocracy,” the Musk aide explained to St. Clair, wherein rewards are granted to “people who do good work.”

Musk is rich enough to carry on his pro-natalist project indefinitely, and the world is full of women of childbearing age who could use $15 million. Musk descendants, therefore, may one day inherit the earth. But before then, Musk may inherit the Republican Party, which he has bought and paid for, and in so doing reshape the right’s traditional thinking about the notion of family. The old days are over, superseded by something worse.