I’ve got to hand it to Vanity Fair for successfully nailing this I-dare-you-not-to-click headline that caught my eye this weekend about one of President Trump’s favorite billionaire besties: Elon Musk’s breeding spree is so much wilder than you thought.
Folks, I can confirm that headline is 100% accurate. His “spree” is definitely wilder than I thought — because I haven’t actually thought about what the Tesla CEO does behind closed doors at all. Nor, I suspect, have many other sane, well-adjusted adults, considering that people like me who lead busy, respectable lives tend not to spend a lot of mindshare on what consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom. (It also seems beyond strange to refer to the fathering of children as a “breeding spree,” but that’s neither here nor there.)
This all stems from a long Wall Street Journal “expose” about Musk and the mothers of his more than a dozen children that landed a few days ago like some bombshell State Department leak. Admittedly, it’s all soapy and titillating stuff — a multi-baby mama drama that’s chock full of NDAs, child support payments, and instances of Musk approaching women on X who he wants to have children with. And it goes without saying that everyone, as per usual when it comes to Trump’s rocket-building chaos twin, is absolutely losing their minds over this story.
The following is an actual sentence published this weekend in The Guardian, one of the most important newspapers in the world: “I regret to inform you that, once again, we are all being forced to think about Elon Musk’s gonads” (we? forced?). In a similar vein, the headline of Mediaite’s recap about this sordid nonsense is particularly trashy and reads like Musk is the only willing participant in these arrangements: WSJ Drops Shock Exposé on Elon Musk’s Alleged Attempts to Impregnate X Influencers.
What are we actually doing here?
I can tell you what we’re not doing. Reporting on how many children Musk has fathered, and any arrangements therein that might in fact strike you as bizarre, is not the unpacking of the kind of scandal that matters or is important. Instead, we’re rubbernecking at the reproductive choices of a tech billionaire like it’s Season 3 of Love Island: Mars Edition. And the media’s breathless coverage only makes it worse, treating Musk’s personal life with the same intensity they might give to a constitutional crisis or a CEO getting perp-walked in handcuffs.
The coverage of all this feels like the mash-up of Page Six and Politico that none of us asked for or needs. And it’s particularly ironic, considering the fact that the political party Musk has been waging holy war against used to preach quite passionately about what people do in the bedroom being nobody’s business but their own. “We’ll build a country,” Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz promised in an August 2024 speech, “where the government stays the hell out of your bedroom!”
So much for staying out of the bedroom — the media has practically set up a press pool outside of Musk’s.
By all means: Scrutinize his politics, and contend with him and his supporters over his views that hold considerable sway over technology and politics in this country. But this whole “and look how weird he is with women, too!” angle is just so lazy and dumb. In fact, it’s a distraction. When it comes to Musk, there’s plenty to interrogate without veering into tawdry gossip territory.
