Elon Musk is not only the richest man in the world (with the permission of another friend of Trump, Larry Ellison, who briefly took his place this week), but perhaps one of the most fertile men on the planet. With the help of in vitro fertilization, the owner of SpaceX and xAI - owner, among others, of the X network, formerly known as Twitter - and CEO of Tesla has, according to The Wall Street Journal, "dozens" of children with different women. Some sources give a figure of 50, 60, or 70. But no one knows for sure.
Musk's goal, not always achieved, is for the mothers to live with their children in a complex of buildings owned by the billionaire not far from the city of Austin, Texas, where Tesla has its headquarters. Six hours south of Austin, also in Texas, is Boca Chica, where the entrepreneur's rocket and satellite company, SpaceX, is located. On the outskirts of Boca Chica, Musk created the city of Space Base this year.
In the Austin housing complex lives, for example, Shivon Zilis, who, according to Musk's father, Errol, in an interview with EL MUNDO last August, is currently dating his son. Zilis is an executive at the world's leading brain implant company, Neuralink, also owned by Musk. How Zilis manages to take care of the at least four children she has with Musk and work from Texas in a company based in California - equivalent to the distance from Madrid to Warsaw - is a bigger mystery than SpaceX's accounts.
Therefore, it is about combining leisure and business, something the Elon family has experience in. Especially his father, Errol Musk, who has been married four times to three different women, setting the precedent for Elon, who has been married three times to two women.
What the son has not done - for now - is reach the level of the father, whose girlfriend for the past decade and mother of two of his children is his stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, 41 years younger than him. Thus, Jana's mother, Heide (who Errol is 21 years older than), is Errol's ex-wife and mother-in-law, and Elon is Jana's adoptive brother and adoptive son. Then they say technology is complicated.
The way Errol and Jana got together, as described by himself to this newspaper, is an example of the Musk style in love, business, and sex: short and to the point. It was not a slow process like Woody Allen and his current wife (and adoptive daughter) Soon-Yi Previn. Rather, it was a "here and now" situation. Three weeks living together and voilà! a pregnancy.
With that precedent, it is not surprising that Elon has opted for in vitro fertilization, faster and more efficient, which also avoids the risk of genetic incompatibilities with what the Wall Street Journal has referred to as a "harem." He hopes to avoid a repeat of the tragedy of his first son, Nevada Alexander, who died at ten weeks old. Although, like everything in this story, there seems to be a mix of scientific superstition, as there is no certainty that Nevada Alexander's death was due to genetic factors.
The relationship between Errol and Jana began in 1992 when he first married Heide, whom he proudly describes as "a South African Dutchwoman," a status symbol in that country, as the first settlers and, until the end of racial segregation, the country's elite, were from that group. Heide, who according to Errol, was "the most beautiful woman in the world," was widowed with three children. One of them, at four years old, was Jana.
Shortly after, Errol and Heide separated. And, between his first and second marriage to Musk, Heide placed her three children in foster care. For ten years, Errol heard nothing from Jana. Until he received a call in 2014. "It was her. She told me she was living in a warehouse with her boyfriend and that social services had taken her four-year-old daughter. I started bringing them food and clothes, and bought them a used car," he recalls.
Two years later, "Jana calls me and says that the 'character' she lives with has kicked her out, so I tell her to come to my house, where my youngest daughter, one of those living in Texas, who was 18 at the time, was." So Jana, who was 29, "lived with us for three weeks. We got along very well. She was a mature woman, but she kept calling her boyfriend crying and ended up going back to him." Meanwhile, Jana's son went to live with his adoptive parents in Australia. Two months later, Jana calls Errol Musk again and says, "I'm pregnant." The response is clear: "It's impossible for me to be the father." Upon the young woman's insistence, the Musk patriarch asks for a DNA test. And, to his surprise, "it turned out that I was the father."
This is how Musk, at 70 years old, became the father of a baby with his double ex-wife's 29-year-old daughter. "He is a very handsome eight-year-old boy, very healthy and very intelligent. He really likes online games and plays against Elon [the businessman is a gaming enthusiast]. There are people who want him to go on a tour of China," the father proudly states.
Since becoming pregnant, Jana and Errol have been a couple, and in 2019, they had a daughter. But they do not live together. As he explains, "I bought her a very nice house with five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a two-car garage 30 kilometers from here, in a residential area where she takes the children to school, and she comes to my house every couple of days and on weekends."
The apartment -actually a house- that Errol has provided for Jana is somewhat reminiscent of what, according to the Wall Street Journal, Elon has offered to several mothers of his children: a Tesla, 15 million dollars, and a monthly salary of 100,000 dollars until the child turns 18. In exchange, there are strict conditions. The mother must remain completely silent about the father's identity. She must give birth by cesarean section, as Musk believes that the pressure of the vaginal walls compresses the brain and makes his children less intelligent. And the child cannot be circumcised. This has created problems with some of his surrogates, who are Jewish. One of them is the one who caused the issue. She is named Ashley St. Clair, an influencer and pro-cryptocurrency in X (formerly Twitter, until Musk bought it). These are the criteria the billionaire follows to find "vessels" - as conservative Americans say - to deposit his seed.
Musk seemed interested in St. Clair's reproductive potential, as she has recounted that he told her she should have ten children. He believes that declining birth rates are an extremely serious problem and is also a believer in the replacement theory, which argues that whites must multiply to avoid being "absorbed" by blacks and Asians.
But everything went awry when St. Clair and Musk quarreled. He sent his trusted man, a strict Mormon named Jared Birchall, to explain to the mother of the richest man's child that if she continued this way, she would end up broke. St. Clair did not yield and ended up having to sell the Tesla that Elon gave her as a bonus for her willingness to sublet her ovaries.