Elon Musk's Known Children and Their Mothers: A Comprehensive Guide | Vanity Fair
Elon Musk is a real quantitative guy, it would seem. He wants lots of the things he wants: companies, money, children with his genetic signature.
With Ashley St. Clair, the reportedly 26-years-old conservative influencer who announced last week that she has a five-month-old son fathered by Musk (which Musk has not yet publicly commented on), the number of known mini Musks stands at 13, a tidy baker’s dozen. Including St. Clair, four women have identified themselves as Musk’s partners in progeny.
Musk recently joked on the social media platform he owns, X (formerly Twitter), that he was gonna need a bigger spaceship to shuttle all his offspring around. (He also has a child he calls X, not to be confused with SpaceX, which is another of his companies. Musk has the X factor, one supposes.) As for the rest of us, keeping track of the billionaire’s known genetic associates is a task, to say the least.
Herewith, a guide.
Born: May 18, 2002 Mother: Justine Wilson
Musk and his first wife, Justine Wilson, married in January 2000. In an essay for Marie Claire, Wilson wrote that as they danced at their wedding reception, Musk told her “I am the alpha in this relationship.” Later in the relationship, he’d tell her that if she was his employee, he’d fire her. The pair welcomed a baby boy, Nevada Alexander, in May 2002. The baby tragically died of complications from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome at 10 weeks old.
“Nevada went down for a nap, placed on his back as always, and stopped breathing,” Wilson wrote in the essay. That same week, Musk sold PayPal to eBay. Wilson wrote that she struggled with the loss of their child. “Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about Nevada’s death,” she explained. “I didn’t understand this, just as he didn’t understand why I grieved openly, which he regarded as ‘emotionally manipulative.’”
Born: April 15, 2004 Mother: Justine Wilson
Though Nevada’s death sent Justine Wilson on what she called in the essay “a years-long inward spiral of depression and distraction,” she began IVF treatments two months after her first child’s death. In April 2004, she gave birth to twins. In April 2022, one of them came out as transgender, and petitioned to change her legal gender and name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, taking her mother’s maiden name, which was granted in June 2022. In legal documents, Vivian wrote that her reasons for requesting the name and gender changes on her new birth certificate were “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
In July 2024, Musk wrote on X that his child was “born gay and slightly autistic, two traits that contribute to gender dysphoria.” Musk also said that Vivian had picked out jackets for Musk and called them “fabulous!” as a four-year-old. “But he was not a girl.”
Vivian Wilson fired back in a series of messages on Threads. “This entire thing is completely made up and there’s a reason for this,” Vivian wrote in part. “He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness. Obviously he can’t say that, so I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype f*g-ing along to use at his discretion. I think that says a lot about how he views queer people and children in general.”
In a 2022 interview with the Financial Times after Vivian filed her petition, Musk blamed her education for turning her against him, calling the teachings “full-on communism.” “It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children],” he said. “Can’t win them all.”
Vivian's twin, Griffin, largely stays out of the spotlight, but according to Musk, accompanied his father to an event in Miami in May 2024.
Born: January 2006 Mother: Justine Wilson
Triplets Kai, Saxon, and Damian, conceived via IVF, were born in January 2006. Details about the three boys have been kept largely private, though Walter Isaacson wrote in a biography of Musk that Damian had become a vegetarian at age eight to “decrease [his] carbon footprint,” and that he was also a musical prodigy. In September 2008, Wilson and Musk announced that they were divorcing.
Born: May 4, 2020 Mother: Grimes (Claire Boucher)
In May 2020, musician Grimes and Musk were a couple, and welcomed son X Æ A-12, whose name was later slightly tweaked to X Æ A-Xii. He was conceived via IVF. While Grimes wrote in Instagram comments that her eldest son’s name was pronounced “just X, like the letter X, then A.I. Like how you said the letter A then I,” Musk had another answer, though he agreed that X, what the child is still typically called now, is pronounced “like the letter.” However, he said on The Joe Rogan Experience, “the ‘Æ’ is pronounced like ‘ash.’”
The last part of the child’s name is a tribute to the CIA’s Lockheed A-12 spy plane. Musk, who suggested the inclusion, called it “the Archangel-12, the precursor to the SR-71, the coolest plane ever.”
Recently, little X was seen badgering Musk in the Oval Office during a press conference, whispering at President Donald Trump to stop talking. According to sources who said that Musk has been sleeping in his office across the street from the White House, X is “around quite a bit.”
Grimes reacted to her eldest son’s presence at the Oval Office meeting on X. “He should not be in public like this,” she wrote. “I did not see this, thank u for alerting me. But I’m glad he was polite. Sigh.”
Born: November 2021Mother: Shivon Zilis
In November 2021, Musk secretly welcomed another set of twins—daughter Azure and son Strider—with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his AI company Neuralink, which was revealed in July 2022. At the time, Musk seemed to wink at the situation in a tweet: “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” he wrote. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far. Mark my words, they are sadly true.”
Born: December 2021Mother: Grimes (Claire Boucher)
Musk had a second child with Grimes, daughter Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, who made her presence known during a Vanity Fair interview. When writer Devin Gordon heard a baby crying upstairs and asked Grimes what was going on, she first seemed to panic. From the profile:
“I’m not at liberty to speak on these things,” she begins, and then all in a tumble says: “Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is just out there. I mean, I think E is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… X is out there. His situation is like that. But, yeah, I don’t know.”
Musk and Grimes were “semi-separated,” in Musk’s words, though Grimes said of the relationship, “I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid. We live in separate houses. We’re best friends. We see each other all the time…. We just have our own thing going on, and I don’t expect other people to understand it,” by the time the baby was born via surrogate in December 2021. Her name is Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, but they usually call her Y. Sometimes they call her Sailor Mars.
Grimes explained the origins of the baby’s unusual name: “Exa” is for the supercomputing term exaFLOPS, “Dark” is “the unknown. People fear it but truly it’s the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe.” The last part is a nod to Lord of the Rings and the elven Galadriel.
“I was fighting for Odysseus Musk,” she told VF. “A girl named Odysseus is my dream.”
Of course, this was the third child Musk welcomed in the span of two-ish months, though his twins with Zilis were not yet public knowledge.
Born: June 2022Mother: Grimes (Claire Boucher)
Isaacson’s September 2023 biography of Musk revealed that he had welcomed another son with Grimes, born in June 2022. Named Techno Mechanicus, the parents call him Tau.
“Tau is so amazing,” Grimes told Isaacson in the book. “He came out with eyes that could just see so deeply into your soul, with so much knowledge. He looks like a little Spock. He’s definitely a Vulcan.”
Following the book’s publication, Grimes issued a statement on social media saying, essentially, that she and Zilis were cool now, and that she wanted to protect baby Tau’s privacy as much as she could.
“I wish I could show u how cute little Techno is but my priority rn is keeping my babies out of the public eye,” she wrote. “Plz respect that at this time.”
“I spoke with Shivon at length finally, which was long overdue. This wasn’t her fault, plz don’t be angry at her! We respect each other a lot and we’re excited to become friends and have the kids grow up together,” she also said. “Women are so often pitted against each other. Speaking with Shivon, it’s very evident she’s an amazing human and we both just want what’s best for our kids.”
Born: UnknownMother: Shivon Zilis
In June 2024, Musk confirmed he welcomed a third child with Zilis. Details such as the baby’s name, sex, and date of birth have not been shared. The baby’s not a secret, Musk told Page Six, he just…didn’t really announce it.
“As for ‘secretly fathered,’ that is also false,” he told Page Six. “All our friends and family know. Failure to issue a press release, which would be bizarre, does not mean ‘secret.’”
Born: September-ish 2024Mother: Ashley St. Clair
On February 14, 2025, St. Clair announced that she was mother to a five-month-old baby, and that Musk was the father. She alleged that he had insisted that she keep her pregnancy and the baby’s existence a secret, and that by his request, she had not included Musk’s name on the baby’s birth certificate. She went public, she claimed, after being hounded by tabloid reporters. Musk, she said, had not been in touch since.
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