Yahoo News The bizarre love life of Elon Musk – from marrying Talulah Riley twice to fathering 12 children
We do not know the child’s name, nor its sex, nor the date or circumstances of its birth.
All we know is that Elon Musk’s 12th child exists and was born this year – his third with Shivon Zilis, who works for his brain implant company, Neuralink.
Musk, 52, confirmed as much to the US gossip magazine, Page Six, after Bloomberg reported news of the birth last Friday. The child was far from a secret, he said, it was just that he and Zilis, 38, had chosen to keep the news among friends and family.
“As for ‘secretly fathered’, that is also false,” he told the publication. “All our friends and family know. Failure to issue a press release, which would be bizarre, does not mean ‘secret’.”
If Musk is choosing to keep his latest child out of the press, that may be because his love life has not always passed without comment. He became the world’s richest man by helping bring about revolutions in several different industries: online payments (PayPal), space transport (SpaceX) and cars (Tesla).
He went on to buy Twitter for a reported $44 billion (£34.7 billion) and next on his list is brain implants. You might have thought he was too busy finessing rockets and studying lithium batteries for much socialising, but Musk’s entrepreneurial triumph has come alongside a spectacular – not to say productive – love life.
The billionaire is an ardent pro-natalist, fond of pronouncements like “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming.” Nobody could accuse him of not doing his bit.
Musk’s first known partner was Jennifer Gwynne, whom he dated for around a year in the mid-90s, while they were students at the University of Pennsylvania. She told interviewers that while she admired his “quiet intensity” he was “not very good” at maintaining a long-distance relationship.
In 2022, she auctioned off photographs of them together, and other items, including a necklace he gave her, for a total of $165,000, saying that she remembered their time together as “amazing”.
His next serious relationship, and first marriage, did not end as cheerfully. Musk met Justine Wilson at university in Ontario. She later recalled that his opening gambit was to ask her out for ice cream.
Having initially said yes, she later changed her mind, only for Musk to show up anyway, brandishing a couple of cones. “He is not a man who takes no for an answer,” Wilson said. They got married in 2000. In her telling, Musk’s romantic insistence evolved into something less appealing: a tendency to be domineering. She has said she would frequently have to explain that she was his wife rather than his employee.
In 2002, Musk and Wilson had a son, Nevada, who died of SIDS at just 10 weeks. In 2022, Musk said the experience was why he would not let Alex Jones, the broadcaster who peddled conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook massacre, back on X.
“My firstborn child died in my arms,” he wrote. “I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.” Wilson, an author, replied to say that it was, in fact, her who had held Nevada at the end.
The couple went on to have five more children: twins Griffin and Vivian in 2002, and triplets, Kai, Saxon and Damian, in 2006. But they divorced in 2008, prompted by Wilson reevaluating her life after a car accident.
He did not wait long to move on. Just six weeks after filing for divorce, Musk texted Wilson to say he was engaged to the British actress, Talulah Riley, who starred in St Trinian’s, having met her in a bar in London. In 2010, they got married in Dornoch Cathedral, just north of Inverness. By 2012 they got divorced, only to get back together and remarry the following year.
Explaining the remarriage, Riley said “it felt silly to be together unmarried after having been married.” It wasn’t to last. Musk filed for divorce in 2014 but withdrew the application. Riley filed in 2016. Coincidentally Riley got married again earlier this week, to the Love, Actually actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster.
Musk appeared to move on quickly. By April 2017, he was known to be dating the actress Amber Heard, recently divorced from Johnny Depp. There was speculation the couple had been seeing each other for longer. By February of the following year, however, they had split up. As with Riley, they seem to have remained friends.
Next came Musk’s relationship with the Canadian musician Grimes, real name Claire Boucher, the one that has attracted most media attention. They were first photographed as a couple at the Met Gala in 2018. In his biography of Musk, Walter Isaacson reported that the pair had bonded over the concept of Roko’s Basilisk, a philosophical thought experiment about an AI superintelligence.
Two years later they had a son, named X Æ A-12 or X for short; a name he would also give to Twitter after he rebranded it. Despite separating over the summer of 2021, they nonetheless had two more children, by surrogate: Exa “Y” Dark Sideræl, born December 2021, and Techno Mechanicus, known as Tau, born in June 2022.
At the Burning Man festival in 2021, around the time of the pair’s split, he reportedly told the singer “I love you, but I don’t love you.” Last September, Grimes filed a petition over parental rights, having claimed in a now deleted social media post that Musk had been restricting access to one of her sons.
To complicate matters further, while this was going on Musk had already started having children with Zilis, a director of operations at Neurolink. Their twins, Strider and Azure, were born just before Y, in November 2021. “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” Musk said of their births in 2022, in a post on X.
After the unusual parenting overlap was reported in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of Musk, Grimes posted online to say that she wanted to “de-escalate” things and that she and Zilis had cleared the air. “Thank you for taking the time to really connect and understand each other,” Zilis replied. “So glad we had such a wonderful talk, was insanely overdue.”
While Musk seems to have maintained relationships with most of his exes, reports suggest a strained relationship with at least one of his children.
In 2022, his transgender daughter Xavier applied to change her name from Xavier Alexander to Vivian Jenna, saying that she no longer wanted to “be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”. Musk has not commented on the move. The rest of his children have maintained a lower profile.
Meanwhile, Musk’s interest in the pro-natalist movement has grown with his family. The group, dominated by tech types and conservatives, believes that falling birth rates all over the world risk a future in which there are not enough working-age people to support and care for the elderly. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, is another who has expressed concern about birthrates and said he plans to have a large family himself. The movement has been controversial, with some drawing connections with eugenics and white supremacy. Musk has been outspoken about his desire for humanity to spread beyond Earth, to Mars and beyond. Such ventures will require a lot of manpower.
Tech gurus are fond of moving fast and breaking things, in the old Facebook mantra. Maybe Musk applies a similar logic to his personal life. There are advantages to being in the inner orbit of one of the richest men ever to live, but challenges, too. To judge by the press blackout around the birth of his most recent child – we assume the 12th, but there is no way to be sure – Musk is learning that his private life may be better off being kept as such.
