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.