Elon Musk has bought an estate in Texas: he wants to settle his 11 children and their mothers there
The billionaire, who constantly warns of demographic collapse, is fighting it in a very original way. Musk recently bought an estate for his unusual family - 11 children and two of their three mothers, writes The New York Times.
Photo: Frédéric Legrand | Dreamstime.com
On a quiet, leafy street lined with expensive homes, a nearly 1,500-square-foot mansion stands out, looking like a villa transported from the hills of Tuscany to Austin, Texas.
It is here that Elon Musk, 53, the world's richest man and perhaps the most important supporter of the 45th President Donald Trump's campaign, is attempting to lay the cornerstone of an extraordinary family estate.
In recent months, Musk has told people close to him that he envisions his children (there are at least 11 of them) and two of their three mothers living in neighboring houses, so that his children can be a part of each other’s lives, and their billionaire dad can spend time with them.
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Directly behind the villa is a six-bedroom mansion. The combined value of both properties was about $35 million. When Musk is in Austin, he often stays in the third mansion, which is about a 10-minute walk from the first two.
Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children and one secretive multi-billionaire father who is obsessed with reducing the birth rate when he is not running one of his six companies. It is a strange family model, but Musk seems to be okay with it.
Fear of demographic collapse
A proponent of in vitro fertilization, Musk even offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances, including former independent vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, according to two people familiar with the offer. Shanahan turned him down.
Musk has tried to keep his growing family a secret for some time. Buying the apartment complex and his idea to populate the mansions with his own children is not just a personal whim. It's about the idea.
He was an early investor in his electric car company Tesla out of concern about humanity's dependence on fossil fuels. The businessman founded his rocket company SpaceX, now a major government contractor, to be able to colonize Mars for humans in the event that Earth becomes uninhabitable.
Over the past two years, he has become increasingly fixated on what he sees as another threat to humanity: declining birth rates. Musk believes that a global demographic collapse is coming that will wipe out humanity. Demographers say his apocalyptic ideas have little to do with reality. But on X, the social network he owns, the billionaire encourages followers to have as many children as possible.
Musk is now based in Pennsylvania, immersed in the presidential campaign and spending tens of millions of dollars to fund Trump's vote-getting operations. A Republican victory would arguably make Musk the most powerful private citizen in the country. Trump has already said he will appoint the billionaire to head an "efficiency commission" that will review the entire federal government.
But it is to Texas that Musk has moved most of his business operations and is trying to set up a family estate there.
Elon Musk's Women
Siobhan Zilis, the mother of some of his children and the head of Musk’s brain-technology startup Neuralink, has already moved into one of the houses with them. But Claire Boucher, the musician better known as Grimes, who is the mother of three more of the billionaire’s children, has long been suing him and has stayed out of his family projects.
The third mother is Justine Musk. She is the billionaire's first wife. They have five children (the sixth child died at 10 weeks of sudden infant death syndrome). Justine's children are teenagers and young adults. There is a place in the Austin complex where they can visit if they want, although the billionaire has a bad relationship with at least one of these children.
Attacks on “childless cat ladies”
By choosing Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, Trump has made the issue of declining birth rates a central part of his presidential campaign. Vance even made headlines by railing against “childless cat ladies.” Musk’s push for more children aligns with the ideas of world leaders like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Musk has become a hero to pronatalists who believe people should have as many children as possible.
In a biography published in 2015, Musk expressed concern that educated people were slow to have children.
"I'm not saying that only smart people should have children. I'm just saying that smart people should have children, too," he wrote. "In my observation, many really smart women don't have children, or if they do, they only have one child."
His views seem to echo those of his father, Errol Musk. The elder Musk, 78, has seven children by three women. His father praises his son's "good genes" and his desire to have many children.
In a book published in 2023, Elon Musk told his biographer that the relationship between him and his father, who lives in South Africa, can be complicated, in part because Errol Musk had two children with his former stepdaughter. But the elder Musk said he and his son communicate often and that he recently traveled to Texas to visit him and his grandchildren.
All Mask's children
Musk and his first wife, Justine Musk, had their first child, a boy named Nevada, in 2002, two years after they married. The baby died unexpectedly in infancy.
“Elon made it clear he didn’t want to talk about Nevada’s death,” Justine Musk wrote in 2010. “I didn’t understand that, and he didn’t understand why I was grieving openly.”
She, "making her first visit to the IVF clinic less than two months later," recovered from the death of her son.
The couple had five more children conceived through IVF before they divorced in 2008: twins Griffin and Vivian, now 20, and triplets Saxon, Damian and Kai, now about 10. Musk has said IVF is a more effective way to have children because it allows parents to control part of the process.
By 2016, as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk had amassed a net worth of more than $11 billion, according to Forbes. That year, he first warned on Twitter, now known as X, that the world was heading toward population collapse.
He has been married twice, divorcing actress Talulah Riley, whose desire to focus on her career instead of having children was a major reason for their split. In 2020, Musk and Boucher, whom he began dating two years earlier, welcomed their first child, a son they named X Æ A-Xii, or X for short.
“Population collapse is the second biggest threat to civilization after AI,” he wrote on Twitter in July 2020, a couple of months after X was born.
Over the next few years, Musk fathered children with Boucher and also with Zilis. In 2021, without Boucher's knowledge, Musk donated sperm to Zilis, who became pregnant with twins via IVF. That same year, the billionaire and Boucher were expecting their second child, also conceived via IVF and carried by a surrogate.
Zilis gave birth to twins in late 2021, a few weeks before Boucher's daughter was born. Boucher learned that Musk was the father of Zilis' children a month after they were born.
To complicate matters further, Elon took the name he and Boucher had chosen for their daughter, Valkyrie, for one of the Zilis twins. Boucher was so offended that she wrote a song about the episode, which she posted on Twitter.
"The girl cursed with my daughter's name," she wrote in a now-deleted tweet, "will now bear the shame of her mother."
Zilis eventually changed her daughter's name, and Bushe chose a different name for her child.
At the time, Boucher was living in Austin and raising her children with Musk. Zilis also lived in the city.
Both women at times treated Musk as a romantic partner and supported his beliefs about the need to have children to save humanity.
"I've spent most of my adult life working toward what I thought would best contribute to a better future within my skill set. But having children makes fighting for that goal seem undeniable and instinctively right," Zilis wrote on Page X in March.
Fear of a deserted planet
In 2021, Musk's foundation gave $10 million to the University of Texas to study fertility trends. Since 2021, he has published at least 67 papers on the topic, 33 of them last year.
"I'm doing my best to encourage more people to become parents and ideally have three or more children so that humanity can progress," he wrote in February.
Musk is praised by supporters of a growing pronatalist movement. Those on the Christian right believe that children should be conceived in traditional marriages between a man and a woman; those who share the Silicon Valley ethos see a variety of family models as acceptable, as well as the use of modern reproductive technologies such as IVF.
Simone and Malcolm Collins, who founded the Pronatalist Foundation in 2021, welcome what Collins called Silicon Valley’s “clearer vision of the future.” The couple, who have four children, believe they are working for the good of humanity.
"Our goals are based on the idea of creating a pluralistic intergalactic human civilization," Collins said.
But few demographers are convinced that the planet will face a catastrophic demographic decline in the next few decades. In July, the United Nations said the world’s population, now 8 billion, is expected to grow by 2 billion over the next 60 years, then gradually decline by about 700 million.
However, a number of developed countries, such as Japan, Italy and Germany, are struggling to increase their populations as they face the economic consequences of declining birth rates, such as a shrinking workforce and the cost of caring for the elderly.
“Those who deliberately choose not to have children are essentially asking other people’s children to take care of them in their old age,” Musk wrote on Page X in 2023. It was a response to videos of dual-income couples bragging about not having children.
Such trends have alarmed other global tech figures. Skype co-founder Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Collins foundation. He is a father of five. Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging app Telegram, said in July that he had fathered more than 100 biological children through sperm donation. Durov, who is under arrest in France, has said he plans to “open source” his DNA.
Musk has also offered to share his DNA. At a dinner party at the home of a Silicon Valley luminary last year, he offered to provide sperm to a married couple he had met only a few times, according to two people who were present.
The couple mentioned at dinner that they were having trouble conceiving. Musk told them he would be happy to help and bragged about his many children.
Musk made a similar offer to Shanahan in the winter of 2022, around the time she admitted to having sex with Musk. Nicole now denies having an affair with Elon.
A former running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Shanahan has a daughter with her ex-husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
"With his money he can afford any whim"
Musk originally hoped to build a compound for his family on hundreds of acres he and his companies owned outside Austin, not far from Tesla's headquarters. But that idea appears to have fallen apart after the Justice Department began investigating whether Tesla's resources were used to build a home for Musk's personal use.
In August 2023, the billionaire stated in a post on X that he was “not building any house.”
By then, Musk had begun touring Austin looking for properties that might suit his unusually large family, but he was having problems with at least one of his children's mothers.
He lived with Bush in a 650-square-meter house when the couple had their third child, a son born via a surrogate mother.
Musk wanted to buy property near the home he shared with Boucher to create a private compound and house more of his children.
But Boucher, who once described her relationship with Musk as “very volatile,” moved out of Austin in the summer of 2023. They are now in a custody battle with Musk over their children.
Still, the billionaire continued to buy homes. Homeowners say he sometimes offered 20 to 70 percent more than their properties were worth. Some had to sign non-disclosure agreements just to see the offer.
It is unclear which of Musk’s family members will live in the homes. Some of his older children are not close to their father, including his daughter Vivian, who is transgender. In an interview, Musk said Vivian was “dead, killed by the virus of the awakened mind.” Vivian accused her father of pretending to care about his children.
"You're not a family man," she wrote on the social media site Threads in August.
Currently, only Zilis lives in Austin and is seen at events around the city. In June, Musk confirmed to The New York Post that he had a third child with Zilis, after Bloomberg reported the child's existence.
When Musk is in town, neighbors, including some who have never met him, say they can tell when someone is home because of the extra security posted at the entrance. Sometimes they see a groomer taking a small dog out of the house.
Neighbors don't know why Musk chose this area. He clearly values privacy, and the area where the homes are located is densely populated and unfenced.
"I think with that kind of money, he probably has a lot of whims and will do something else soon," said Jim Lewis, a retired farmer who lives near Musk's home.
In September, pop star Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris' presidential campaign by captioning her Instagram post "Childless Cat Lady." Musk wrote on X: "Okay Taylor... you win... I'll give you a baby and protect your cats with my life."
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People close to Musk believe he was only half joking.
PS Elon Musk, his lawyer and the head of his family office did not respond to requests for comment.
Representatives for Bush and Riley did not respond to requests for comment.
Zilis and Shanahan also did not respond to requests for comment.
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