Here’s My Best Attempt to Explain the Elon Musk/Ashley St. Clair Baby Drama

St. Clair claims Musk is refusing to acknowledge his 13th (known!) child, while Musk has spent the last 24 hours tweeting about the “genocide” of white South Africans.

By Kylie Cheung  |  February 17, 2025 | 2:03pm
Photos: Twitter/Getty Images In DepthLatest
Here’s My Best Attempt to Explain the Elon Musk/Ashley St. Clair Baby Drama

Hard as he tries to be relatable, Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire currently hacking away at our government with all the precision of a 13-year-old boy in a demolition room, has little in common with the masses. But on Friday (Valentine’s Day) he found himself in the same boat as the rest of us—that is, shocked—when conservative influencer and transphobic children’s book author Ashley St. Clair spontaneously dropped a Notes-app-like graphic announcing that, five months ago, she became the mother of Musk’s 13th (known!) child. Following St. Clair’s little announcement, Musk has yet to really respond, instead appearing to boost trolls who are harassing St. Clair. Obviously, my group chats have yet to know a moment’s peace since the news, but I’m here to perform my patriotic duty and do my best to share everything I’ve managed to piece together. 

“Five months ago, I welcomed a new baby into the world. Elon Musk is the father,” St. Clair, who is 26 to Musk’s 53, tweeted on Friday. “I have not previously disclosed this to protect our child’s privacy and safety, but in recent days it has become clear that tabloid media intends to do so, regardless of the harm it will cause.” She’s yet to disclose which tabloids, if any, were harassing her.

Following St. Clair’s bombshell post, Musk on Saturday elevated a far-right influencer’s conspiracy theory that St. Clair has been trying to honey-pot Musk for years. Then on Sunday, the New York Post published a shocking profile of St. Clair, complete with a glamorous photoshoot that, as some people have observed, pretty starkly contradicts her repeated pleas for privacy. In the profile, St. Clair claims that Musk essentially ghosted her amid negotiations for him to acknowledge the child.

She recounts Musk first “[sliding] into my DMs” in 2023, then meeting Musk that summer to interview him for the right-wing satirical news site, The Babylon Bee. She claims they started a romantic relationship shortly after, but that the relationship fizzled out immediately once St. Clair became pregnant. “I was told to keep it secret. I was being asked to keep it a secret forever,” she said. St. Clair told the Post that Musk then provided her with an apartment in Manhattan’s Financial District and a security detail, but ended their romantic relationship. “I was completely isolated during my pregnancy. Every part of my career and everything I used to do I couldn’t do anymore. I was told not to tell anybody.” The Post reviewed texts between her and Musk’s financial manager, Jared Birchall, that show them reaching an agreement for Musk to be left off the baby’s birth certificate. St. Clair claims she hasn’t even been permitted to take the baby outside of her apartment for a walk.

This is St. Clair’s second child, as she has one from a previous relationship in 2021. Her “career” largely consists of far-right, rage-bait posts, including a more recent string of wildly racist, unsubstantiated posts accusing Delta Air Lines of flying undocumented immigrants released from a detention center on her flight in December.

Unsurprisingly, St.Clair’s Friday night post set off a firestorm of online reactions, including users resurfacing her extensive interactions with Musk on Twitter dating back to 2023. In November 2023—which, if you do the math, is right around when the now-five-month-old child was conceived—Musk and St. Clair tweeted back-and-forth to each other about her choice to go off birth control; a few months before that, they joked with each other about the “pull-out method,” with St. Clair insisting that Musk take a trip to “horny jail.” (Vomit.) Others resurfaced seemingly omniscient and incredibly bizarre predictions from random users that Musk would soon impregnate St. Clair.

There’s also been confusion about how St. Clair and Musk’s baby even came into the world. Most of Musk’s children were conceived through surrogacy, IVF, or other reproductive technologies rather than sex. Musk has spent the last several years soft-launching new children left and right, and framing himself as a Messianic figure whose divine genetic code and far-spreading seed will save humanity from extinction. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Musk’s alleged history of trying to pressure employees to have children with him; where he might call this fulfillment of his duty to populate Earth, I would call it sexual harassment.

Instead of addressing anything about this fiasco, Musk has gone a dramatically different route. On Saturday, he replied, “Whoa,”  to a tweet from neo-Nazi influencer Milo Yiannopoulos, claiming that St. Clair had spent half a decade scheming to have children with Musk. Yiannopoulos posted a screenshot of St. Clair joking in 2020 about wanting to get “Elon Musk’s attention for a marriage proposal.” St. Clair then replied to Musk’s “Whoa” in a since-deleted tweet, writing, “Elon, we have been trying to communicate for the past several days, and you have not responded. When are you going to reply to us instead of publicly responding to smears from an individual who just posted photos of me in underwear at 15 years old?” It’s not clear what St. Clair is referring to in the latter part of her reply, but she seems to imply Yiannopoulos at one point accessed and shared inappropriate photos of her as a minor.

Other conservative voices have also seemingly weighed in: On Sunday, unprompted, St. Clair tweeted an image of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling him a “welfare queen,” to which recently unemployed Florida man Matt Gaetz replied, “Abjectly hilarious”—not sure if he’s laughing at or along with St. Clair! Liberal influencers have been nosing around too, observing that St. Clair deleted a tweet from last summer accusing Kamala Harris of “bending over for a man to get ahead.”

On Saturday, St.Clair’s publicist shared a statement suggesting that Musk refuses to acknowledge his own child. The statement claimed Musk and St. Clair have been “privately working towards an agreement about raising their child for some time.” It continued, “We are waiting for Elon to publicly acknowledge his parental role with Ashley, to end unwarranted speculation, and Ashley trusts that Elon intends to finish their agreement quickly, in the best interests of the wellbeing and security of the child they share.” 

Of course, Musk is giving St. Clair very, very little reason to “trust” he’ll do anything in her “best interests” any time soon. On Sunday, he claimed he’d go “offline” for a while to finish the launch of X/Twitter’s AI, Grok. Instead, he’s spent the last 24 hours firing off dozens of tweets, promoting racist conspiracy theories about DEI and also the “genocide” of white South Africans—nothing about his 13th child. “I am endlessly amused by the infinite indignities I suffer on the very platform that I own,” he tweeted at three in the morning on Monday.

And, in lieu of any comment from Musk, nosy social media users have understandably been working overtime to fill in the blanks, resurfacing old posts and pondering the timing of everything. The TrueAnon podcast uncovered a tweet from St. Clair on July 27, 2024, which reads, “There is no sin as cruel as alienating a child from a parent. Seeing so much of this everywhere.” This came from around the same time Grimes’ mother publicly pleaded with Musk to let Grimes’ children with him see their dying great-grandmother. Meanwhile, as St. Clair maintains that she went public with her allegations on Valentine’s Day because an unspecified “tabloid” forced her hand, it may be worth questioning this version of events—right-wingers love to call out and direct vitriol toward journalists and media outlets, so it stands out that St. Clair won’t name the outlets that were allegedly pressing her. It seems possible that, given Musk’s streak of wholly ignoring her, she would make the choice to go public herself.

But if Musk is ignoring all of this, his supporters certainly aren’t, as they spent the weekend smearing her as crazy and desperate. I don’t have a single word of defense for St. Clair, an unrepentant bigot. As for Musk’s behavior, you just have to laugh that these are the people claiming to be the authorities on “family values.” I’d argue these two deserve each other.

 
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