Bulwark Takes - Elon Musk’s Sick Breeding Plan

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

JVL and Andrew Egger break down in detail the insane WSJ article on Elon Musk's plans to create a "legion" of children as he wants to have as many children as possible, with 14 publicly known children so far and counting. Plus, the cruel, heartless treatment of his many baby mamas by both him and his assistant. Read the article

Hello, everyone. I'm JVL, here with my colleague Andrew Egger of The Bulwark. The Wall Street Journal today has a big expose on Elon Musk's baby mama drama, his harem drama. It is full of some of the craziest shit you have ever seen. Andrew, I have printed it out. I'm holding it, printed printed out right here, highlighted and annotated for us to go through. But I want to start you out with something from like paragraph six. Musk has at least 14 children with four women, but multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk's children is much higher than publicly

known. Yeah, you know, this thing's a journey. I don't know how I know we're going to talk about this. I don't know how this video is going to go. I don't know where we're going to end up. If you people haven't read this piece like like your jaw is on the floor by like word 200 and then it just goes on for a thousand words more i don't i don't remember how long it is exactly more than that couple thousand words more and it just gets crazier and crazier so the the primary source is ashley st claire who is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with musk

over all of this uh i'm i want to set things up a little bit for people. So Sinclair caught Musk's fancy, or rather her womb did, on Twitter where he began approaching her. And he slid into her DMs, as the kids say, and invited her out to Twitter headquarters and invited her onto his plane. And then she tells us about the first time they had sex. It was in New York, I think. And then like at one point there, they're on a trip together and she's like, I'm ovulating. And he's like, I'm paraphrasing that part. You're only paraphrasing a very small amount, like not very much.

Very small amount. The point is, once she's knocked up, Musk has a fixer, a Winston Wolf-style fellow whose last name is – Burchell. Burchell. And this guy's primary job seems to be taking care of Musk's problems. So he quarterbacked the $250 million that Musk gave to the Trump campaign, and he takes care of the baby mamas. And what he does is he goes to Sinclair and says, you can have $15 million in a lump sum and then $100,000 a month until the kid is 21 in exchange for just a few things.

You've got to sign an NDA. You can never reveal the parentage of the child. You cannot speak ill of Elon Musk. He can say whatever he wants, though, about you. And if you say something bad about him or violate the terms of the NDA in any way, you then have to repay the 15 mil lump sum. Yeah. Just to dwell on a couple more specific things of this agreement that is signed there.

Some of it appears to be taking place in like it's open and shut. It's on paper. It's in this agreement. There also appear to be a number of sort of penumbral, unwritten rules about being the mother of one of Elon Musk's children. Where Ashley St. Clair starts to get into trouble, according to this feature, is that she went out and she hired her own lawyer as she was about to give birth to this baby. That, in the mind of Elon Musk, is a real no-no, it seems. So, hold on, I've got to find this. I'm going to, boy, this is...

Stand by with me. One of the things that Birchall tells Sinclair, he offers her some advice. His boss is a very big-hearted, kind, and generous person, but he has a different side when a mother of his child goes quote the legal route in these discussions quote that always always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise yeah you know we don't got to involve the lawyers in this. Ah!

Can we back up just a little bit? One more, one more, one more, one more. Birchall described Musk's expectations to St. Clair. Quote, privacy and confidentiality is the top of the list in every aspect of his life. Every aspect. And his entire world is set up to be like a meritocracy. Benefits flow, he said, when people do good work, which means keeping their traps shut. Their traps shut and their wombs productive. Can you fairly characterize somebody who tweets 300 times a day to be obsessed with privacy

and confidentiality? No, the important thing is that everybody is very confidential about Elon Musk. You know, all this stuff flows one direction, right? I mean, let's back up a little bit. People kind of know this stuff, but like we've all known for a long time that Elon has this interesting and unique perspective on family formation, right? He has a lot of children with a lot of women, some but not all of which have taken place via IVF. Can we call it family formation?

That's a good point. How about new human creation? Well, actually, he has his own term for it. Here's another random line from the piece. In Musk's dark view of the world, civilization is under threat because of a declining population. He's driven to correct this historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence. Musk refers to his offspring as a, quote, legion. During St. Clair's pregnancy, Musk suggested they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster.

Quote, to reach legion level before the apocalypse, he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by the Wall Street Journal, we will need to use surrogates. So that is an excellent point. Not family so much as his legion of high IQ. That is a totally noble thing that a well-adjusted human being who does not at all have insane problems would say. Yeah, well, how do you even talk about it? Should we just keep reading? Should we just do more quotes? This is the most insane.

I said it already. You've got to go read this thing because it's all laid out in the Wall Street Journal kind of prose, and it's all very understated. But the lunacy just drips off of every paragraph. But not just lunacy. There's also some other stuff. Another thing they, this is actually brilliantly done by the journal, they bring up a conference in which Musk was talking about the importance of natalism and pronatalism and how he says, you know, I encourage, yeah, I have a lot of kids and I encourage others to have a lot of kids. Here's the Wall Street Journal.

Separately, Musk has said he is concerned about what he called third world countries having higher birth rates. So for Elon, it's not really natalism. It's like Muskism. He wants to be Attila the Hun and he wants to sire 7% of like the children in Eurasia. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, some of it is just sort of garden variety racism. Like the part that you just mentioned is like, you know, that kind of people are having all the babies and our kind of people are having not enough babies and that's a problem. And you run into that kind of thing, unfortunately, all the time in these sort of pronatalist spaces. It's kind of a weird thing because I think you and I both have some sympathies in that direction as far as declining worldwide birth rates and things like that are concerned.

But not so much in that sort of racial titration kind of way. But then the other thing with Elon is it's not just like the brown folks are having too many kids and the white folks are having too few. I mean he obviously sees himself as not just like meritorious because he's a white guy. He himself is this – in his own mind, this sort of ubermensch type figure who, like you say, needs to be siring as many children as humanly possible. Can we just do a couple more things about him personally just because like I know we're bouncing all over the place here. Andrew, we're doing this for three hours, buddy. Oh my gosh. OK. So here's a couple more things about him personally? Just because, like, I know we're bouncing all over the place here. Andrew, we're doing this for three hours, buddy. Oh, my gosh.

Okay, so here's a couple more. This is another quote. While Musk posts sometimes dozens of times a day on X about right-wing politics or his companies, among other things on his mind, he often interacts with lesser-known users. He replies to them and sometimes interacts through direct messages, some of whom he eventually solicits to have his babies, according to people who have viewed the messages. This is just a thing Elon does. He sees your tweets. He's like, oh, those are some interesting tweets. I like what I'm seeing in the profile picture.

Is there a special name for that kind of engagement? Like the engagement where somebody says, may I impregnate you? Are you looking for grooming? Or are you looking for something a little bit more specific? No, I think grooming is probably the right word, isn't it? And like as the guy who owns the company that he now pays users to get good engagement on and all those sorts of things, the story goes through one particular example of a girl who he followed and boosted up and helped her become an influencer and then started hitting

up in the DMs. I mean, this is all really astonishingly – And she's getting 21K a month from Twitter until she declines to get impregnated by him, at which point he turns off her monetization. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No, the whole thing is so strange. I mean Elon has very famously – he's had a couple of – he's been married a couple of times. He has a lot of children with his first wife. I don't think any with his second. I could be wrong about that. I don't remember. But then has obviously had a sequence of kind of high-profile girlfriends. There's this woman.

I'm blanking on her name right now, who's like an executive at Neuralink. She's discussed at some length. Yes, Zinni, I think, is her name. Zilli. Zillis. Yeah, yeah. And then obviously the singer Grimes was was involved with him for for a time so just let me just do one more one more chunk because this is this is maybe the thing

that my jaw was on the ground hardest for birchall this is the the okay also let's talk about real quick about him he is such an interesting figure because the the uh the story kind of lays him out a little bit, and he's just sort of like a happily married, personally very kind of restrained, family-oriented Mormon father who does all this work for Elon professionally. Like, who are these people? Anyway, Birchall, that guy, was involved in acquiring the property for a compound in Austin where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences. Neuralink executive Siobhan Zillis lives.

She does live. She lives there in that gated community with their children. And Musk comes and goes. Musk also attempted to get Grimes to move to the compound, but she refused. Similarly, he tried to get St. Clair to spend some time in Austin, quote, with our kid legion, according to a text he sent her. And this, I mean, this is just, this is just a window into his world, right? I mean, just, just the, what do you even say about it? What do you say about it, JVL? You do some riffing here. I want to, I want to, I want to bring up what to me was the single, the two funniest pieces of this entire essay.

The first is where Birchall, the fixer, is describing to Ashley St. Clair the importance of NDAs, non-disclosure agreements. And he says, we've been through way too many issues where to not sign some agreement has turned out badly, he says, because, quote, we have dealt with some very unstable, mentally unstable people. So first of all, if Elon Musk is repeatedly dealing with mentally unstable people in the course of having all these children and you're talking to his lawyer, does that maybe set off some alarm bells for you? Second of all, yeah, Mr. Burchell, perhaps you've heard this expression, like you get up and you meet an asshole. You met an asshole.

You meet two assholes. You met two assholes. But if all day long all you meet are assholes, you're the asshole. Your mentally, your client is the mentally unstable person. That's the reason you have NDAs is because your client is the unstable person. I'm just I'm just a little concerned that this guy who is going to have, you know, 15 The reason you have NDAs is because your client is the unstable person. I'm just a little concerned that this guy who is going to have 15% of all the babies who are born from here on out keeps picking all of these unstable, crazy women to contribute half of the genetic material for these people. That does not really bode well for the future stability of the population. But here's the other part. So St. Clair was engaged in this relationship with Musk

while he was having his court fight with Grimes. And here we have St. Clair had a front row seat to the custody battle since she was dating Musk at the time. And he updated her on the deliberations. A year later, she was in her own fight with Musk. There is a part of me, a very small part of me, A year later, she was in her own fight with Musk. being preyed upon by this man with an insane amount of money who's using his money as a weapon to try to silence her and impose his will on the child they have together, which is all very contemptible, and I feel very bad for Ashley Sinclair because of that.

But bad JVL looks at this and says, I'm so sorry. You sat there watching him do this to somebody else who was already like mother number 17, and you thought, yeah, I'm sure this time will be different. Yeah, you know, I think bad JVL gets enough of a workout these days. You should put him back in the box for this one particular story, this one particular woman, and here's why I think that. Because Ashley St. Clair,

there's a reason this story hasn't come out before. And it is because Elon Musk is doling out money to these women, hand over fist. I mean, you mentioned that sum earlier, $15 million lump sum, and then $100,000 a month in perpetuity until the child hits, did you say 21, I think? So that's a big chunk of change, revocable, if she becomes vengeful and goes public. And I guess she has, and the story kind of dribbles it out, how it kind of, it was a small reduction in that at a time as she took more and more public actions. But now, she's just throwing open the books to a Wall Street Journal reporter, giving us this look that we never would have gotten otherwise.

And I'm grateful for that. At this moment, I'm tempted to be, you know what, like, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, three cheers for Ashley Sinclair and everything she does and says and thinks, because this is a crazy story, and I'm glad we got it. When somebody, you know, the worst person you know just made a great point.

I will say, another thing that really struck me from this is one of the reasons Sinclair didn't sign the deal was in addition to the NDA portion of it, there was no provision of support should the child become gravely ill. And there was no trust fund or life insurance for if Musk died before the kid was 21. Right. Right. insurance for if musk died before the kid was 21 right right that seems to me to be if you are worth 500 billion dollars and you are not willing to write into this a trust fund for the kid when your lifestyle is already not especially conducive to a long actuarial timeline get what i'm picking up there yeah like that's that's weird and punitive and i wouldn't have signed that either if i had been her yeah yeah and it really does speak to what the money's for right i mean obviously the point here is not that you are concerned with setting your child, who you brought into the world, deliberately up for future success.

The money goes to facilitating your not having to think about the child now in the present moment. It's go-away money. It's not set-you-up money. It's not take-care-of-you money. It's go-away money. This is such a bizarrely – I don't know if common is the right word because there's really only a few examples I can come to mind. But you bump into this mindset weirdly often in these tech futurist pronatalist spaces. Who is that Silicon Valley couple who's constantly getting profiled?

They're in New York. They're in New York State. And I they're they're in new york state and i know exactly who you mean they're like weirdos he's a silicon valley type she's uh she like ran for ran for state government in pennsylvania or something at some point maybe they're in pennsylvania but yeah but they have like a similar vibe where where it's and it's very like it's not just like like personal strangen. They almost have like an ideology developed around it where like parenting is not part of this thing at all. Like what matters is just, it's quantity. It's industrial scale production of high functioning human embryos in terms of genetic makeup.

With like really good genetic material. Yeah, right. If you know what I mean. Exactly. No, right. If you know what I mean. Exactly. No, exactly. So here's what I would like to, I'd like to talk a little bit seriously about this with you, Andrew.

So I wrote, as many of our viewers do not know, a book on natalism many years ago. I am something of a natalist myself in that the low fertility stuff seems like a problem. I've written extensively about it. And one thing that I noticed in the course of all of my research and writing in the book and then talking about it was that most of the people concerned with that stuff are weird. I mean, I'm not weird. I'm totally normal. But most of the people on both sides, like, you know, like Margaret Sanger, the godmother of a fairy godmother of abortion in America, was motivated largely by eugenics and racism. And Elon Musk, who wants to populate the world with children who carry his own genetic code, seems to have some racialist leanings somewhere buried deep

down in there. And yet, I, in my real life, I got four kids, and I know a lot of people. I'm Catholic. I live up in the greater New York City area. I am friends with a lot of families who have seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven kids. That is a thing which is vaguely uncommon, but like not so uncommon that you don't see three of those families every day. And I know them and I'm friendly with them. And none of them are like weirdo pronatalists. They are very normal people. Most of them, they've got a lot of kids because they happen to meet their spouse early and get married young.

And most of them also just really like kids. Like, you know, their disposition is just like, you know, there's some people who most people like kids fine. Some people, like, really like kids. They just enjoy being around them. For none of them is it like a project. All of them are, like, deeply involved in their children's lives. And so I think the median like person actually having a bunch of kids is nothing like these freak shows. But at the same time, you know, there are people who have big families because they like children and particularly they like their own children and they want their own children to like grow up with a lot of siblings and have a happy healthy family life at

home and things like that they're not they're not birthing kids as foot soldiers into some greater culture they're trying to fight right sorry they don't call their kids a legion that's the craziest outsourcing like they're not writing checks that they don't have to see them. I mean, these are the people, again, this is just anecdote, but I do know a lot of people like this and, you know, people who drive the sprinter vans because they've got 12 kids and these people are, by and large,

not universally, but by and large, they're the ones volunteering for the sports team and, you know, to help coach and they're always around like just being helpful parents. Like they're not, it's not like they're viewing the, the, the kids as a scoreboard. Right. You know? Right. Right. Yeah. And there's, there's so many strains of this stuff, right? I mean, like, like there's, there's different religious, um, you know, considerations

that come into this, obviously like, you know, considerations that come into this. Obviously, like, you know, different church groups have different views on, like, you know, family planning and birth control at all. There's like a strange Protestant. Honestly, there is. We've been talking all about kind of like the foot soldier mentality of like the crypto, this like weirdly more like atheistic and futuristic type of pronatalism. But there's a similar thing that you do sometimes see in kind of like certain kinds of

like Protestant, like charismatic Protestant, like the Quiverful movement, which is also very much about like raising up the next generation of kind of freedom fighters for the Lord and things like that. So, I mean, and they're all kind of lumped together. And then you just, again, have like the out-and-out racists and great replacement types. And they're all kind of together now under this one policy banner of pro-natalism, which is like – and I guess you can kind of do that when you do, I guess, all have the same policy goal, which is that people should be having more babies and you should facilitate that in terms of tax policy and things like that, right? I mean in terms of U.S. tax policy.

It's the people you want to have more babies, having more babies, right? That is the key to it, right? If all of a sudden you're talking about those same people who, when I was researching this, who would talk about how terrible was birth rates, they would then in the same breath be like, and of course, these Hispanic immigrants, they're having so many babies, they breed like rabbits. I'd be like, what? What? Which again, just factually, there are all sorts of interesting things about the fertility dynamics of immigrants in the United States. But one of the most interesting things is that among Hispanic immigrants, they regressed to the mean, like within one generation in America. But the big spoiler in all of this is that people like Elon, the joke's on you. Because there ain't nothing you can do at the policy level to make people have more kids.

People have been trying since the time of Cesar Augustus to get people to have more kids. There is a huge history of pro-natalism. This is not something that was discovered yesterday. And the evidence on it is pretty remarkable, that if there is a policy lever you can use to get people to have more kids, nobody has found it yet. And China is going through this right now. They revoked their one-child policy. They're now desperately trying to get people to have kids. It's not working. Go to places like Singapore where they hand out baby bonuses and give preferential housing and admissions to the best schools to people who have a second kid or a third kid. Not working. It's because people

aren't stupid. Having kids is really, really hard. There is nothing a government can give you to make up for how hard it is. And so people realize, yeah, I'm not going to do this unless I want to. Yeah. Yeah. And I reason I'm, like, kind of, I consider myself sort of sympathetic to pronatalism or whatever is because I do think it is a pretty good, like, symptom of just sort of civilizational decay when you have basically across the board people are reluctant to put themselves forward into the future because they think the world's going to shit. Or just because they're sort of decadent and are like well you know i i'm enjoying my treatment right because you know capitalism doesn't really value workers having kids it just values the value of workers right i mean there's a lot of a lot of reasons and i would say the the one takeaway i i tried to to get to in my book with people is that convincing people to have kids is a non-starter. It never works. All you can do from the policy perspective is try to make it so that people can achieve the family sizes they want. That's it. And in America, that actually is a big problem we have. Our

fertility rate's about 1.75 right now, but our aspirational fertility rate, meaning like the number of people, the number of kids people say they want in a perfect world is close to like 2.35. And so you could work around the policy levers to try to like figure out, well, okay, so what are the obstacles that are preventing people from getting where they want to go? And are there policies you can do to help people get where they want to go? But you can't. Car seat safety. Yeah. The car seat regulations, man, they're too oppressive. J.D. Vance has it right on that.

We just had our third kid, and it was a little bit of a breach. You know, it kills me because I'm the guy who literally wrote that. Okay. Yeah. All right. God help me. I have so much to answer for,rew all right can we can we wrap around for one last second last we've been doing all the because i have to go pick my kids up from

school we've been doing all the abstract stuff go read this goddamn wall street journal piece about how insane elon musk on a personal level is with all the women in his life and god help us all