Is it a cult, a colony, a harem? Not only does Elon Musk have – so far – at least 11 children by three different women, born between 2002 and today, but he wants to bring them all together under the same roof. The tribe’s headquarters would be a large compound in Austin, Texas. The 53-year-old South African billionaire has long bemoaned the dangers of a plummeting birth rate. In July 2022 in a post on his social X, he declared it the greatest danger facing our civilization. To quote Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing, “The world must be peopled!” and perhaps Musk wants to repopulate the Earth himself, pending the founding of the Mars colony he also talks about.
The revelation comes from the New York Times, according to which the Trump supporter, who is worth about $270 billion (as Forbes estimates), bought three mansions in Texas with the intention of having his children and two of their three mothers live close together, because, according to sources close to the billionaire, this will allow the children to be present in each other’s lives and, no less important, will allow Musk to “schedule time with them.” The Times speaks of the idea as proof of Musk’s existential angst, which they deem to be at the bottom of his business ventures.
The compound is apparently made up of a Tuscan-style villa and an adjacent six-bedroom property; total cost, about $35 million. Musk would have another house for himself a 10-minute walk away.
Musk’s first child died at a few weeks old, a victim of Sudden Death Syndrome. He then had five more with his first wife, Justine Wilson: Vivian Jenna and her twin, Griffin (now 20 years old) and triplets Saxon, Damian, and Kai. After his divorce from Wilson, Musk had a stormy relationship with British actress Talulah Riley (married and divorced twice), but no children with her.
From 2020 onward, however, he made up for it. The last three were procreated with Shivon Zilis, an executive of his company Neuralink, who is apparently the only one of his wives who has already moved to Texas: twins via in vitro fertilization, and another son born in 2024, through surrogacy. This does not prevent Musk from visiting the Vatican or Giorgia Meloni, whose government in Italy has just voted a law to make gestation for others a “universal crime”.
With Claire “Grimes” Boucher, Musk had another three children between 2020 and 2022, partly overlapping with those he had with Zilis; first, two twins named X Æ A-Xii, 4, better known as “X” and Exa Dark Sideræl, 2, or “Y,” then Techno Mechanicus, or “Tau,” whose existence was not revealed until 2024. Musk however, is embroiled in a toxic child custody lawsuit with Grimes.
The Tesla founder has also publicly offered his DNA to several women, including Taylor Swift. When the singer endorsed Kamala Harris for the White House, signing her Instagram post as “Childless Cat Lady,” Musk wrote to her on Instagram, “Fine, Taylor…you win…I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” He also offered his sperm to former independent vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, who did not accept. But he also allegedly offered it to employees of his company SpaceX, to establish a colony on Mars, the Red Planet that he hopes to reach with his space adventures. After all, at only 53, he has time to have more children with other wives — or by other means.
Interestingly, Musk had written in 2020 that he intended to dispose of all his real estate holdings, and revealed at the time that he had moved into a mere $50,000 cottage on the SpaceX launch pad site.
At least one of his daughters, however, will stay away from Austin: she is transgender Vivian Jenna Wilson, who said in an interview with NBC last summer that Musk had been an absent father, and in his rare appearances, cruel to her because she was gay and feminine. The two are estranged and Vivian took her mother’s last name. Musk declared this year that his daughter is in fact dead because she was “killed by the mind woke virus.”
