Recent news brings the known total of his offspring to 12, many with odd names and all from Canadian mothers
“All our friends and family know,” he said. “Failure to issue a press release, which would be bizarre, does not mean ‘secret.’”
Here’s what the know about the many children of Musk.
There have been 12, and they have some unusual names
Musk has not revealed the sex, name or exact birthdate of his latest child. One could refer to the infant as “Baby X” pending more information, but that would be pretty close to some of the actual names Musk has chosen for his offspring.
Musk’s other children with Zilis are twins Strider and Azure, born in November of 2021.
He also has five children with Justine Musk (née Wilson), to whom he was married from 2000 to 2008. They are twins Griffin and Vivian, and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian. The couple’s firstborn, Nevada, died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks.
More recently, Musk has had three children with singer Claire Boucher, who goes by Grimes. Here’s where the names get peculiar. Son X Æ A-12 was born in 2020, and daughter Exa Dark Sideræl in 2021. They now go by the names X and Y, respectively. Last year saw the birth of Techno Mechanicus.
The kids have some Canadian connections
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, but his mother, Maye Musk, is from Regina. In 1989, the future billionaire got a Canadian passport through her and moved to Canada, where he studied at Queen’s University in Kingston for two years before going to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He has Canadian, American and South African citizenship.
Meanwhile (and probably coincidentally), all the mothers of Musk’s children are also Canadian. Justine Wilson was born in Peterborough, Ont., in 1972 and also went to Queen’s, where she got a degree in English literature. She is a writer whose novels include BloodAngel and Uninvited.
Grimes has won several Junos for her work, including breakthrough artist of the year and electronic album of the year for Visions in 2013. She was born in Vancouver in 1988 and raised there. She attended McGill in Montreal but did not complete her studies.
Zilis was born in Markham, Ont., in 1986 and went to Yale, where she got degrees in economics and philosophy. From 2017 to 2019 she served as a project director at Musk’s Tesla Inc. She is now director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, a company Musk cofounded in 2016.
Musk is a proponent of big families
In 2022, Musk told the New York Post’s Page Six: “Bravo to big families,” adding that he wants “as many (kids) as I am able to spend time with and be a good father.”
This was the same year that he tweeted out: “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.”
This took many by surprise, especially those who list climate change, nuclear weapons and overpopulation as some of humanity’s biggest concerns. But Musk is adamant that Earth’s population is in danger of bottoming out.
His desire for more children has caused problems
In 2013, one of the women who reported directly to Musk left the company and alleged that he had asked her to have his babies, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the allegations. Their relationship deteriorated after she declined his offer, the Journal said.
There’s no telling how many more children are in his future
Musk turns 52 this month, and six of his 12 children have been born within the last five years, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see more births in the years ahead. Still, he is a long way from joining the record books among famously prolific fathers.
Henry I holds the record for the most children fathered by a British monarch at (probably) 27, most of them illegitimate. A few centuries later, John II, Duke of Cleaves (in what is now Germany) earned the nickname “The Babymaker” for his 66 or so children. And in the 1800s, Mormon leader and polygamist Brigham Young had 56 children from 16 of his more than 50 wives.
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