Elon Musk’s hidden agenda to have 5,000 kids: Drama at the White House, conflicts with the mothers, and the surprising motivation behind his desire to father children exposed

Tesla is currently experiencing a decline in profits, with incidents of people setting fire to its electric cars. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is facing challenges and criticism from various quarters. His behavior and actions have led to confrontations with White House officials, with reports of heated arguments taking place. Notably, even Donald Trump, the former President, has started distancing himself from Musk.

There are rumors of Musk engaging in shouting matches with members of the White House cabinet due to his domineering behavior. Trump himself has hinted at Musk no longer being part of his administration. It seems that the President is recognizing Musk’s actions as head of the Department of Government Efficiency as a potential political problem.

Observers suggest that Musk, who previously referred to himself as Trump’s ‘First Buddy,’ has transitioned into a troublesome figure for the administration. His leadership style at the Department of Government Efficiency is being viewed as overly aggressive and causing more harm than good. As a result, Musk’s standing within political circles appears to be at risk.

So when Musk, 53, announced last Tuesday he was ‘significantly’ stepping back next month from his government role, it came as no surprise to Washington-watchers.

It’s traditional for people in Musk’s position to save face by saying that they want to spend more time with their family but, in his case, that would raise the question: which one exactly?

For he has at least four families that we know of and reportedly wants many more. Insiders have revealed how Musk is determined to expand a ‘harem’ of attractive, bright and usually conservative young women to keep churning out his offspring for what his planet-sized ego tells him will be the salvation of humanity.

The mercurial and eccentric Musk, the world’s richest person, has fathered at least 14 children with four women, many of them through IVF. He is convinced that ‘civilisation is going to crumble’ unless people – especially highly intelligent people (like him) – start having more children.

  People close to him say that the true number of Musk’s children is actually ‘much higher than publicly known’.

His estranged transgender daughter Vivian last month claimed she didn’t know how many half-siblings she has.

Vivian, 20, also said that Musk prefers to use IVF so he can select the baby’s sex – consequently nearly all of them are boys.

He also selects their outlandish names. As well as six children (one of whom died in infancy) with his first wife, writer Justine Wilson, Musk has three – X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl and Tau Techno Mechanicus – with Canadian singer Grimes (real name Claire Boucher).

He has another four – Strider, Azure, Arcadia and Seldon Lycurgus – with Shivon Zilis, a senior executive at his neurotechnology company Neuralink.

And that was officially assumed to be the lot… until in February, a New York-based conservative writer and online influencer named Ashley St Clair announced on social media that she’d secretly had his child, a boy named Romulus, five months earlier.

St Clair, 26, went to court, accusing Musk of refusing to take a paternity test and asking her not to put his name on the baby’s birth certificate. Earlier this month, a court-ordered lab test revealed a 99.9999 per cent likelihood of Musk being the father.

She claims Musk has been minimally involved in the child’s life and slashed his financial support to punish her for revealing his paternity.

A rabid tweeter on his social media site X, Musk is happy for the world to know his trenchant views on pretty much everything – the big exception being his private life.

Here, according to St Clair, he spends millions on non-disclosure agreements and payouts to various women in a bid to keep them quiet about the children he’s sired.

Sadly for the secretive entrepreneur, St Clair wouldn’t and has instead provided a jaw-dropping insight into Musk’s bizarre pursuit of potential breeding partners and the extent to which he tries to control them. Musk told her he is intent on producing a ‘legion’ of offspring to help prevent the ‘apocalypse’ threatening the world from population decline, she said.

The fact that she shares his views on this issue, which some dub ‘pronatalism’, was one of the reasons that they first connected on social media. They met in spring 2023 after Musk started talking to her on X, later inviting her to visit the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

The relationship swiftly became romantic, she said. The first time they had sex, Musk light-heartedly said that they should ‘pick a name’ for their future child and he regularly discussed having children, she told The Wall Street Journal.

They eventually conceived their son during a New Year trip to the Caribbean island of St Barts. During her pregnancy, she said Musk suggested to her that they find other women as surrogate mothers so they could produce children faster. He said she should have ten children.

‘To reach legion level before the apocalypse,’ he said in a text message seen by the Journal, ‘we will need to use surrogates.’ (A legion was the primary military unit in the army of Ancient Rome, each one typically consisting of about 5,000 soldiers.)

St Clair says Musk urged her to have their baby by caesarean section as he believes it maximises the child’s skull size and thus the size of its brain.

Musk is convinced that mankind’s very survival is threatened by a dwindling population and he is said to have resolved to ‘seed the Earth with more human beings of high intelligence’. His ambition to colonise Mars with his rocket company is part of this mission, as it would provide a haven for humanity when, as he believes is inevitable, Earth’s resources are exhausted.

To be fair to him, it’s not just about sex. It has been claimed that Musk offers his sperm to friends and acquaintances.

St Clair said Musk told her that in 2023 he’d been approached by ‘Japanese officials’ who asked him to donate sperm – ‘No romance or anything, just sperm’, he said – for a ‘high-profile woman’. He said he agreed but didn’t reveal the woman’s name.

Although Musk strongly denied the claims, it was reported last October that he’d once offered to donate sperm to a married couple he met at a Silicon Valley dinner party and, another time, to Nicole Shanahan, the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Last November, two months after their baby was born, Musk texted St Clair: ‘I want to knock you up again.’As he has since admitted, Musk, whose net worth is £277billion, offered to pay £11.3 million towards St Clair’s home and living expenses, as well as £75,000 monthly until the child turned 21.

However, the clinical coldness and anonymity of the Musk reproduction operation and the various legal strictures involved – notably the NDA – irked St Clair, who worried that her child would feel illegitimate.

She also insisted on a paternity test because New York courts demand one before they will approve child-support agreements. St Clair said she had to negotiate with Musk’s ‘fixer’, a former banker named Jared Birchall, who handles his family affairs. Birchall reassured her that similar secrecy agreements had been negotiated with other mothers, she alleged.

He also said that NDAs were necessary because he and Musk had ‘dealt with some very unstable people’ and that Musk was the ‘biggest lightning rod on the planet’.

According to St Clair, Birchall warned her that, while Musk was a ‘very big-hearted, kind and generous person’, if a mother of one of his children got lawyers involved in their relationship, ‘that always, always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise’.

Birchall told her ‘privacy and confidentiality’ topped Musk’s list of priorities in every aspect of his life, adding that benefits flow when ‘people do good work’. His boss, he said, wasn’t convinced he was the father of St Clair’s child anyway.

However, St Clair made clear that the confidentiality was only working one way. Musk’s NDA did not oblige him to keep quiet about their baby.

Indeed, St Clair said she’d been contacted by another woman Musk had invited to have a baby, but she hadn’t wanted to be sucked in to his ‘harem drama’.

St Clair isn’t the only woman Musk has contacted on X about having his children. Cryptocurrency commentator Tiffany Fong attracted his attention when she started posting support for Trump last year. Musk’s reposting of her messages to his 219million followers increased her own following.

However, she turned him down when he messaged her expressing interest in them having children. Fong has since said she’d rather the story had remained private.

Other women have joined the harem and accepted the attached strings, along with the considerable financial benefits.

Canadian Sharon Zilis, 39, a Yale University-educated tech expert and venture capitalist, met Musk through their shared interest in artificial intelligence and became a rising star in his business empire.

‘He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,’ Zilis told Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson.

They had twins in November 2021 through IVF – just weeks before Musk had a second child with pop star Grimes via a surrogate.Grimes did not know that Zilis, who was a friend, was pregnant by Musk. The situation became so peculiar that, at one point, Zilis and the surrogate for Grimes’s baby were just a few rooms from each other in the same Texas maternity hospital.

Zilis and her children now live in a luxurious gated community in Austin, Texas, in a compound Musk has bought to house his various offspring and their mothers.

The adjoining homes, which Musk bought for a total of £27 million, include a Tuscan-

style villa and a six-bedroom mansion. When he visits, Musk stays at a third mansion a ten-minute walk away.

While Zilis and her four young ‘Musketeers’ live in the Austin compound, Grimes – who’s had a rocky relationship with Musk, including a protracted legal battle – has resisted moving in with her trio.

In February, she publicly accused Musk of ignoring one of their offspring’s ‘medical crisis’ and pleaded with him to get in touch. Musk also tried to persuade St Clair to move into the compound and join ‘our kid legion’.

Musk hasn’t responded to the Journal’s bombshell report about St Clair other than to scathingly compare the newspaper to the showbusiness website TMZ.

However, the revelations only serve to illustrate how Musk’s carefully cultivated public image is starting to fracture.

His business and political lives have thrown up similar humiliations. Rewarded by Trump for sinking £216million into Republican campaign coffers in 2024, Musk swanned into the White House pledging to cut a wildly unrealistic $2trillion (£1.5trillion) from the federal budget. Instead, his DOGE department says it’s saved $160billion and critics say even that figure is inflated.

In the process, he’s ensured most of his colleagues will be glad to see the back of him. Some have been walking out of his meetings. Last week, Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly got into a shouting match in front of the President inside the White House. It was so heated that aides had to physically separate them.

Musk has also had bust-ups with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Trade Adviser Peter Navarro. Last month, say witnesses, Duffy and a colleague furiously branded Musk a ‘liar’ in a cabinet meeting over his attempts to sack sorely needed air traffic controllers.

Senior officials have privately complained that Musk always tries to be funny and act like the cleverest person in the room but fails dismally at both.

He has dabbled in European politics, tweeting in support of the jailed hard-Right British activist Tommy Robinson and cheering a poll showing Germany’s anti-migrant AfD party in the ascendance.

Political pundits complain that the buccaneering Musk, who once brought ‘panache’ to the Republicans, is now dead weight around the administration, only fuelling antipathy towards it. Clearly overstretched, he’s proving similarly unimpressive at running his electric-car company, Tesla, the main source of his immense wealth.

Last week he had to grovel to shareholders and promise to focus more on the business after it reported a 20 per cent drop in car sales for the first three months of the year, compared with the same period last year.

Meanwhile, profits plunged 71 per cent. Analysts blamed its boss’s political divisiveness and Musk agreed. ‘It’s never a dull moment these days,’ he joked to Tesla investors and analysts.

Drama-loving Musk has always seemed to relish never having a dull moment, but even he surely can’t be enjoying his spectacular fall from grace.