In May of 2020, billionaire Elon Musk unexpectedly declared on Twitter (now X) that he was “selling almost all physical possessions.” Going a step further, he added: “Will own no house.” In interviews over the next couple of years, he continued to describe his lifestyle as minimalist or nomadic, claiming that he had no primary residence and stayed in friends’ spare bedrooms.
By the end of 2023, however, Musk’s family had grown significantly: two more children with Claire Boucher (better known as the pop star Grimes), and twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain-chip implant company Neuralink. Zilis would have a third child with Musk in 2024, making him the father of 11 known children. It was during this period, according to new reporting from the New York Times, that the world’s richest man began to lay plans for a compound patched together from several properties he was buying in Austin, Texas, to house his growing brood. Far from owning “no house,” Musk now has at least three mansions in close proximity in a wealthy enclave of the city, with enough room for all his kids and their mothers.
Musk is hardly shy about his reasons for having such a large family: He believes in a looming population collapse due to declining birth rates in developed nations including the United States, which this year he called the “biggest problem that humanity faces.” (Demographers say his fears are unfounded.) Aligned with a population-boosting movement known as pronatalism, he has often encouraged more procreation to combat the trend, and once joked, “I’m doing my part.”
The Times revealed that Musk continues to seek out women willing to have children with him, sometimes offering his semen to friends and acquaintances. Nicole Shanahan, Silicon Valley attorney and running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until he dropped out of the presidential race, was one to turn him down, according to two sources. (Shanahan has denied allegations that she and Musk had an affair in 2021, when she was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.) According to attendees at a dinner party thrown by a tech executive last year, Musk also said he could provide sperm to “a married couple he had met socially only a handful of times,” who had mentioned at the meal that they were having difficulty conceiving. Musk also “boasted about his many children” during the conversation, other guests told the Times.
Following Taylor Swift‘s September endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, which she signed as “Childless Cat Lady” — a jab at Trump running mate Sen. J.D. Vance for his own disparaging comments against women who don’t have kids — Musk again saw a chance to disseminate his genes. “Fine Taylor,” he posted on X, “you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” Of this message, the Times notes: “People close to Mr. Musk believe he was only half joking.”
Though the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has tried to challenge the idea, his notions of population collapse have seen him take up tenets of Great Replacement, a racist conspiracy theory which holds that white demographics in the West are being diminished or diluted through low fertility and non-white migration into these countries, which is facilitated by powerful elites. The white nationalist ideology has inspired mass shootings. Even before he became Donald Trump‘s most prominent mega-donor, Musk was railing against immigrants, baselessly claiming that President Biden allowed them to illegally cross the U.S. border so they could vote for Democrats. (Undocumented migrants cannot vote and have no path to citizenship.) Musk also last year engaged with an X user who claimed that “western Jewish populations” support the “flooding” of their countries by “hordes of minorities,” replying to the antisemitic remark by writing: “You have said the actual truth.”
Musk’s apparent ambition to grow his dynasty from a sprawling personal campus in Austin, with help from a variety of women, has parallels to the designs of another infamous billionaire: the late financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who made connections within the highest echelons of the scientific community as he considered a scheme to spread his DNA by impregnating women at his vast and remote ranch in New Mexico. But Musk abandoned the option of building on acres of land outside Austin and is instead embedded in a residential neighborhood.
And while he theoretically has the progeny to pack his multiple homes there, only Zilis and her children have moved in, the Times reports. Musk and Grimes are currently embroiled in a custody battle, while Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk — mother of five of his children — has described herself as “estranged” from him. Their 20-year-old daughter, Vivian Wilson, who is transgender, disowned him when she turned 18 and legally changed her name and gender. Musk said in an interview this year that he considered Wilson dead, killed by what he called “the woke mind virus,” prompting Wilson to fire back on social media, claiming that Musk was an absent father and had distorted the facts of her transition. (Wilson has meanwhile said that her mother is “very supportive.”)
Almost all of Musk’s children have been conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF), and the Times reports that he is a proponent of the reproductive technology because it allows parents a greater measure of control over pregnancy. While Trump has voiced general support for IVF access, anti-abortion Republicans including Vance have argued against it, since it requires the fertilization of multiple embryos, some of which may later be destroyed. The GOP has made efforts at the state level to strip away IVF rights, while Senate Republicans have continued to block bills meant to guarantee federal IVF protections. Musk has given at least $12.4 million to help the GOP retake the Senate this year.
In a remote interview Tuesday at the Future Investment Initiative Summit, an event held by a Saudi nonprofit, Musk again said falling birth rates are the greatest threat to humanity at present, calling it a “crisis.”