Should you be an attractive female sitting next to Elon Musk at dinner, he may, if you are very lucky, offer you one of his most precious assets – his sperm.
Maybe it’s one of his “jokes”. Or maybe those rumours are not true, just like most of the stuff he ejaculates onto his own platform.
Still, like the unelected monarch he is, he does like to boast about how many children he has fathered. Fourteen so far. I don’t know whether to discount the one he has disowned for being trans and infected by the “woke mind virus”. Anyway, he has lots. He believes everyone should. Boris Johnson was another sperminator, the numbers were just not his forte.
One might think Musk’s obsession with procreation has to do with insatiable lust, but most of his kids were conceived through IVF. He welcomed his 14th child with Shivon Zilis: this is their fourth child together. I think calling this woman his partner may be a stretch, though.
Zilis took to her X account to announce the birth of “Seldon Lycurgus”. However, she did not reveal when the baby was born.
He has six children with his ex-wife Justine Wilson, five of which were conceived via IVF. Their first child, a boy named Nevada, died of sudden infant death syndrome at 10 weeks old. Then he had another three with the musician Grimes. MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair has recently petitioned in court to establish Musk as the father of her baby boy. He also often uses surrogates.
All of this, of course, is readily available to the richest man in the world. I have known several couples whose failure to conceive was because of the guy’s inability to produce sperm with enough motility (though the woman often received the brunt of the blame).
Often, alcohol, smoking dope or anti-depressants would mean the sperm were just too stoned or couldn’t really be bothered to get to the egg. With Musk’s history of depression and self-confessed drug use, one does wonder…
Still, this “pro-natalist” has the technology to prove his virility, if such a thing matters. After watching him rampage around with a chainsaw like a seven-year-old on a sugar rush, it clearly does.
The whole issue for the pro-natalist movement is the belief that women are not having enough babies to replace the existing population, leaving us with an ageing demographic with no one to look after them. (Whisper it, for no one wants to hear it, but that is why we need immigration, because these people often act as carers).
The part that is also missing is that combining motherhood and a career does not figure in today’s world.
I recently went to Japan. Not one 30-something woman I met there showed any interest in getting married or having kids. Their 20-something siblings don’t even bother dating. This situation is the same in Korea. It is global and it is not going to be solved by billionaires impregnating as many women as possible.
Watching Musk drag around his four-year-old son “Lil X” – Musk even took him to Auschwitz – one wonders exactly what he thinks childcare is anyway. What four-year-old wants to go to late-night banquets at Mar-a-Lago where there are no other children? Why does Grimes have to plead in public for Musk to respond to matters affecting their kids?
It’s gruesome. And if Musk has no real idea how to be an actual father, then we can look at his own childhood for clues as to why. It was a time when he was bullied, when his father Errol always took the side of those who bullied him and repeatedly told him he was a moron. His father then had two children with his own stepdaughter. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, a friend said that Elon’s hands shook whenever he saw his father.
So whether we want to diagnose Musk with PTSD or Asperger’s, we can say that he had no good role model.
But I would love to take him to parts of the African continent – he is South African, after all – where women, through lack of choice, are having dozens of kids. I went to Uganda to help a charity with contraception. Most 19-year-olds had at least two children. I met women in their 30s with 13 kids, often looking after their sister’s ones too, because the sister had died in childbirth.
We were there to offer contraceptive implants, and women from the villages walked 50 miles to get them, though the nurses were sometimes met by men with machetes.
So the issue here is that the wrong kind of people are having kids. Poor people. What Musk ultimately wants is humans to do the labour that bots – however sophisticated – will not be able to do. He sees the underpopulation crisis as a civilisational collapse.
Doubtless, he will have more kids with daft names. I suggest Protensio for the next one (short for Protensio Patrum Meorum Ego Sum).
The one word that none of these pro-natalists ever use, I note, is love. We have children, even when in difficult circumstances, out of love. This is not a word our new sperminating overlords like much, is it? It’s rather too human for them. And being human is, of course, exactly what they are trying to get away from.
