Does Elon Musk Have a ‘Breeding Kink?’

The breeding kink—intense sexual attraction to the idea of getting pregnant, or getting someone else pregnant—is having a moment right now. A deluge of viral TikToks of users are professing their yearning to breed and be bred. A porn creator told Vice this week about a recent surge in demand for “breeding” content. There is quite literally a WebMD article on breeding fetishism, not to mention an entire genre of horror movies and documentaries about unethical fertility doctors secretly fathering hundreds of kids.

And the discovery of Elon Musk’s eighth and ninth (known) children on Wednesday led the richest man in the world to triumphantly tweet: “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” and “I hope you have big families and congrats to those who already do!” Which led many to suspect:

As Twitter rushes to speculate about the intimate desires that may or may not be fueling the 51-year-old Tesla CEO’s noted seed-spreading, it’s worth unpacking what, exactly, is so hot about breeding to some people. WebMD notes that people with a breeding fetish may “enjoy the ‘risky’ feeling of potentially permanent consequences from a sexual act,” and the “feeling of power exchange, where one partner is ‘submitting’ to the other.” Domination and objectification are pretty standard kinks, and as Vice explains, the breeding fetish is rife with these themes: Someone on the receiving end of breeding is “a hole, a cum bucket, or, in the parlance of the kink, a ‘breeding bitch.’” People with breeding kinks might also just be attracted to the idea of ejaculating in someone without protection—also a pretty standard desire.

Now, to ascertain whether or not Musk has a breeding fetish is to wade into territory that I’m not certain I have the stomach for. This is a man I take great pains to not think about as a sexual being, a thought that might just prevent me from ever having sex again.

But there’s certainly evidence for and against Musk getting off to the fantasy of breeding—in the “for” column, there’s a tidbit Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, shared with his biographer that he “wanted to get married and have kids early on.” There’s Grimes’ Vanity Fair interview from earlier this year in which she revealed that she and Musk, with whom she shares two kids, “wanted at least three or four” children.

And then there’s his general obsession with not just himself, but everyone having as many kids as possible:

Or, perhaps none of the women with whom Musk shares children were even into him at all, but were merely breeding fetishists themselves, and knew a man as vain and desperate as Musk could give them exactly what they wanted? Who knows how many of them are out there, really??? Disgusting as intercourse with him may be, on some level I get the appeal of having children with Musk—you’d never have to work again, and you’d probably never have to talk to him again, either, given his abysmal parenting.

On the flip side of the “Does Elon Musk have a breeding fetish?” debate, it seems very possible Musk doesn’t have a breeding kink, and is just sexist, narcissistic, rich enough to afford infinity kids, and a low-key eugenicist.

Because people are having fewer children these days for all the obvious reasons—lack of paid family leave, lack of universal child care, all of the unending costs of pregnancy and parenting, simply not wanting to have kids, etc.—Musk, who notably fired employees for getting pregnant and taking child care leave, has devoted his platform to fanning the flames of a great moral panic about this. Since he opposes public funding for child care, he knows what he’s doing when he calls for all of us to have more children: He’s telling women to quit their jobs and go back to the kitchen, and he knows this.

Musk also obviously sees himself as the self-appointed hero of humanity’s supposed crisis of declining births—he’s quite literally tweeted as much. He’s also claimed that “if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad,” which is why Musk, a supposedly very smart man, has taken it upon himself to have nine kids. It’s also worth ruminating on his assertion that “smart” people—a quality that has always been defined by white supremacist constructs—are the ones who should be having more kids.

Whether or not Musk has a breeding fetish, by having nine kids, he’s certainly committed to the bit. That said, satisfying someone’s breeding fetish doesn’t necessarily require actually impregnating them—as WebMD notes, a breeding kink could just be fodder for masturbation, or a fantasy role-play scenario in which sexual partners play-act unprotected sex and unplanned pregnancy.

In today’s post-Roe v. Wade America, unplanned pregnancy sounds like a nightmare—but for some breeding fetishists, the added risk, stakes, and fear might just be more of a turn-on. And for those breeding fetishists who fear they might someday, accidentally take their kink too far, might I recommend the most potent birth control form of all? Thinking about Elon Musk having sex.

For someone as obsessed with growing the population as Musk is, every time he tweets about procreating, he inevitably kills the mood for dozens of couples who might have otherwise conceived.