Elon Musk allegedly offered the mother of his latest baby £12million and £80,000 per month in hush money to keep his paternity of her child secret.
Ashley St Clair claims the billionaire, 53, would pay the money until the boy turned 21. The 26-year-old disclosed earlier this year that she gave birth to Musk’s son – his 14th publicly known offspring – in early February. According to court filings, the boy, Romulus, was confirmed to be “99.9999%” likely the Tesla chief’s son via a paternity test.
Musk has not publicly acknowledged the child and remains in a legal battle with St Clair over the matter. She told The Wall Street Journal that Musk, through his longtime aide Jared Birchall, proposed the multimillion-dollar settlement on the condition she keep his paternity secret.
The deal also included not saying anything negative about him. However, she claimed, the agreement would not prevent Musk from speaking about her.
According to St Clair, Birchall approached her while she was in labour with a request to leave Musk’s name off the birth certificate, which she complied with. However, she retained an attorney to represent her interests. She claimed to ultimately reject the proposed financial agreement, citing concerns about the imbalance of terms.
Musk allegedly insisted on specific conditions surrounding the birth, including that it be delivered via caesarian section – believing it leads to larger brain development – and that the child not be circumcised. St Clair, who is Jewish, declined both.
The two met in spring 2023 through social media, and their relationship developed over private visits to Musk’s X offices and trips aboard his private jet. The billionaire has not commented publicly on the matter.
Previously, St Clair said of the SpaceX founder: “Musk was very funny. He was smart. He was very down to earth. It started with X interactions and he slid into my DM’s. I think it was a meme.” At the time, she “didn’t particularly have much interest in Elon” other than his acquisition of Twitter.
She first became aware of the billionaire thanks to her “gay best friend” who frequently asked her to watch videos of Musk’s SpaceX rocket launches. “And at one point he said, ‘Are you ever in San Francisco or Austin?’. And I said, ‘I am in Austin and Texas a good amount for work.’”
St Clair continued, adding that she worked for the Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical website, at the time. After Musk restored the Babylon Bee to Twitter from an eight-month suspension for a joke about a transgender Biden administration official, Bee CEO Seth Dillon asked St Clair to fly to San Francisco to interview the billionaire at his new company’s headquarters.
“After the interview, I got a text from him saying, ‘Feel like going to Providence [Rhode Island] tonight?’” St Clair said. The alleged romance blossomed from there, she claimed, until she became pregnant.
Musk is said to refer to his growing brood of children as a “legion”- a term borrowed from the Roman military, reflecting his long-standing concern over declining global birth rates. St Clair claims he told her to “pick a name” for their future child after they first slept together. The pair conceived a baby boy during a trip to St. Barts over New Year’s.
St Clair alleges that while she was pregnant, Musk floated the idea of involving additional women in their family planning to accelerate childbearing. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse, we will need to use surrogates,” he reportedly texted her. He has previously suggested that increasing birth rates is essential to saving human civilisation. This belief, echoed in conservative circles, has been a recurring theme in Musk’s public appearances.
Speaking at an investment conference in Saudi Arabia last year, he warned that “civilisation is going to crumble” if people don’t start having more children. “If you don’t make new humans, there’s no humanity, and all the policies in the world don’t matter,” he said. When asked whether he was doing his part, Musk responded: “You’ve got to walk the talk. So, I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids.”
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