- Tesla CEO Elon Musk has 11 known children with three different mothers.
- The world's richest individual has said the biggest threat facing the world was a flatlining birthrate.
- Here's a look at Musk's family.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who's said that he's "doing his best to help the underpopulation crisis," has long been sounding the alarm on a potential population collapse — a problem he has said is a bigger risk to civilization than global warming.
How many biological children does Elon Musk have?
Elon Musk has 11 known children with three different partners.
Musk's first wife, the author Justine Musk, told Musk's biographer, Ashlee Vance, that he "wanted to get married and have kids early on." In 2002, the couple had their first child, Nevada Alexander Musk, who died of sudden infant death syndrome at just 10 weeks. After the baby's death, the couple turned to in vitro fertilization. Justine gave birth to twins, Vivian and Griffin, in 2004, then triplets, Kai, Saxon, and Damian, in 2006.
In 2022, Vivian was granted approval to legally change her name and gender. In her petition, she wrote that she no longer wished "to be related to my biological father in any way."
Musk has recently ramped up his criticism about transgender laws for children under the age of 18. The billionaire spoke about his child's transition on a podcast with Jordan B. Peterson and said he was "tricked into" signing papers to approve the transition.
He said he believed Wilson to be "dead, killed by the woke mind virus."
Following the comments, Wilson spoke out in a rare exclusive interview with NBC News, where she described Musk as being an unsupportive parent and referred to him as "very quick to anger," "uncaring," and "narcissistic."
Musk was also linked with singer Grimes in 2018. Grimes gave birth to their first child, X Æ A-Xii Musk, in 2020.
The existence of their second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, was revealed in March of 2022 when Exa started crying while Grimes was being interviewed by a Vanity Fair reporter. Exa's name was later changed to "Y" or "why," the singer said on Twitter in March of this year — or just "?," though Grimes said, "the government won't recognize that."
The couple also has a third child, a son named Techno Mechanicus, who was born in mid-June 2022. Musk and Grimes kept his existence a secret as well, until the recent release of a new biography of Musk by author Walter Isaacson. Techno Mechanicus goes by the nickname Tau, a hint at Musk's own birthday — the Greek letter stands for the number equal to two times pi, which rounds to 6.28. Both Tau and the couple's daughter Y were born through a surrogate.
Business Insider also revealed that Musk had twins quietly in November 2021 with Neuralink's director of special projects, Shivon Zilis. The two are named Strider and Azure, and Zillis frequently shares posts about them on X.
Musk quietly had another child with the executive earlier this year, Bloomberg reported in June. The billionaire confirmed the news to Page Six, telling the outlet that the child was no "secret" to those close to him.
"As for 'secretly fathered,' that is also false," Musk told the outlet. "All our friends and family know. Failure to issue a press release, which would be bizarre, does not mean 'secret.'"
The world's richest individual has said the biggest threat facing the world was a flatlining birthrate and claimed that overpopulation was a myth.
The SpaceX CEO wants to put humans in a settlement on Mars. He previously said on a podcast that SpaceX will put humans on the planet with its Starship rockets in five to 10 years. However, he claimed there would not be enough people to move to Mars if the demographic crisis continued.
How do you pronounce the names of Musk's son with Grimes?
Musk and Grimes originally had named their son X Æ A-12 but had to change it to X Æ A-Xii following a violation of California's naming laws. Grimes broke down the significance of each letter of the bizarre name on Twitter, explaining that X stands for "the unknown variable," Æ stands for "my elven spelling of Ai," and A-12 is the "precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft)."
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Grimes later clarified in an Instagram comment: "It's just X, like the letter X. Then A.I. Like how you said the letter A then I." Musk used a conflicting pronunciation, saying on the "Joe Rogan Experience" that the Æ is pronounced "ash."
While it's still not clear how the latter half of the name is pronounced, it appears that Musk and Grimes are keeping it simple day-to-day and simply calling the baby X.
Did Musk use IVF to conceive his children?
Yes, Musk used IVF to conceive five of his children with his first wife Justine, as were Musk's twins he had last year with his Neuralink employee, Shivon Zilis. It's unclear whether Zilis' third child with Musk was conceived with IVF.
His second and third children with Grimes were born through a surrogate.