The ongoing soap opera that is Elon Musk’s love life and world repopulation effort again took center stage on Wednesday as The Wall Street Journal detailed his drama-laden relationship with Ashley St. Clair and other women who have borne his children.
Dana Mattioli, the article’s author, largely takes a naive and sympathetic view of St. Clair, who gave birth to Musk’s child Romulus, while painting Musk as the villain. Not that anyone in the legacy media is particularly interested in chastity or biblical morality, but rather Musk’s shift to the right has made him a favorite punching bag of leftists, and his sexual escapades provide an inviting target.
While clearly aiming for a takedown of Musk (see Mattioli’s ridiculous contention that DOGE is targeting Social Security benefits), the article ends up exposing St. Clair (and its author) as more than a little foolish for thinking that transactional sex and transactional child-making should be, well, something other than transactional.
St. Clair, for instance, complained that “she was being caught up in Musk’s ‘harem drama.’” Stunning. One wonders how she might have been randomly sucked into a string of lawsuits and online kerfuffles with the world’s richest man while finding it difficult to come out on top (aside from raking in hundreds of thousands and, perhaps, millions of dollars, that is). Musk’s fixer, Jared Birchall, justified the necessity of St. Clair signing a nondisclosure agreement by citing Musk’s past run-ins with “very unstable, mentally unstable, people.” St. Clair seems just such a person by nearly every available metric.
But inasmuch as the Journal in this case (and the media as one giant ugly conglomerate in nearly every case) wants to demonize Musk to undercut Trump and the right, Musk has clearly merited his fair share of criticism with his machine-gun approach to repopulating the universe. It’s not that the collapse of birth rates isn’t a problem. It certainly is. But Musk’s vending-machine dispersal of his DNA — along with cash subsidies — is exactly the wrong way to save civilization. The answer to humanity’s civilizational crisis isn’t the multiplication of fatherless children; the solution is men who are truly willing to be fathers.
Musk reduces fatherhood to passing along his genes and putting food on the table. He’s not alone in this. Forty percent of babies in the United States are born out of wedlock, and there are plenty of non-billionaire absentee dads. But a father isn’t just a DNA-donor and bring-home-the-bacon sort of person. A father is supposed to be a man-of-the-house, hug-crying-kids-in-the-middle-of-the-night, beat-the-tar-out-of-anyone-who-tries-to-hurt-you sort of person.
Obviously there are deployments, work trips, night shifts, and so forth, but in general fathers should be there for their children — and “there” is home, not a harem “complex” like that Musk allegedly proposed. When a baby comes into the world, he can do little aside from crying, and the father should often be near enough to hear those cries — even though the mother is the primary caretaker and the father will likely spend long hours away at work. A father should change his babies’ diapers and know his kids’ quirks and witness their day-to-day triumphs and temper tantrums.
Children should be able to yell, “Dad!” far too loudly and dramatically for whatever the problem is and not be met with silence or their mother telling them that Dad isn’t here, again. They should be able to watch their dad shave, kiss their mother, use sarcasm, and even engage in other less exemplary behaviors (like playing video games all night, for example) on a regular basis. It’s fun and heart-warming to see Musk trot the globe with X and other offspring in tow, but trips to the Oval Office don’t make up for perennial absence. Musk may cover the cost of St. Clair’s $15k-a-month apartment, but he’s not there to hear Romulus cry.
Musk is undeniably a historic figure. He’s the most successful businessman and innovator of his time, an intellectual outlier, and a free speech liberator. Without him, Kamala Harris might be sitting in the White House right now. But Musk misunderstands human nature and human capital. Humans are spiritual beings with emotions and a will — not mere “boot loaders” for an omniscient AI chatbot. His children need to be trained and mentored, not just handed the gift of intelligence and told, “Have fun saving humanity, kids.” And to the degree that Musk’s intelligence is heritable, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. The key input is Musk himself, not his genetics, and Musk isn’t scalable in the way his genes are.
Without his personal involvement as a father, Musk’s children could just as easily become evil geniuses as saviors of civilization. More important, children aren’t simply units of production in the war to save humanity, or at least, they shouldn’t be. Not to dads. Yes, they will fight the state’s wars, pay its taxes, and sustain its existence. But to fathers, children should mean much, much more. I know numerous fathers — true force multipliers — who are having lots of children within the confines of marriage and doing much to save humanity. But for them, rescuing civilization is a byproduct; the children are an end in themselves. Despite his civilizational aspirations, Musk doesn’t seem to go as far as viewing his children as mere units. But he comes close, and he could learn much from these men.
Musk is an exceptional human being. But he’s not an exception to the laws and principles of the universe. These laws aren’t really broken in the long run; they break those who attempt to break them. The world’s richest man is in danger of clogging the gears of his brilliance and productivity with self-inflicted relational drama and leaving his children practically fatherless in the process. In theory, he can leverage his wealth to escape the first danger. But his children can’t pay their way out of fatherlessness; they need their dad. Not just his DNA and his money.
Joshua Monnington is an assistant editor at The Federalist. He was previously an editor at Regnery Publishing and is a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Jesus Christ is King
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