There are close friendships and then there’s whatever Elon Musk has.
The MAGA billionaire, who is also crazy about in vitro fertilization, has apparently offered compadres and acquaintances his own semen, according to a report in The New York Times.
One pal, the high-powered Silicon Valley attorney Nicole Shanahan, declined, the newspaper said, citing two people familiar with her totally understandable decision.
ADVERTISEMENT
Musk and Shanahan, who was the vice presidential nominee on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s failed independent bid for the White House, didn’t reply to the Times’ requests for comment.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2022 that Shanahan had a tryst with Musk, leading to her then-husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, to file for divorce. She strongly denies the affair.
The Tesla CEO’s willingness—proactive desire, even—to dish out his sperm derives from his increasing neuroses about declining birth rates, the Times suggested, noting that the world’s richest man has posted more than five dozen times about fertility and birth rates on social media in the last three years and that he has donated millions to fertility research.
Musk has also expressed his anxieties in interviews.
“In the past we could rely upon simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate,” he told Tucker Carlson on Fox News last year. “But once you have birth control and abortions and whatnot, now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct but not procreate … I’m sort of worried that—hey, civilization, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization’s going to crumble.”
While birthrates have declined in some advanced economies, the United Nations forecasts the world population, currently more than 8 billion, will peak at 10.4 billion in 2080.
The Times reported that, at a dinner party for well-heeled Silicon Valley types last year, Musk offered his semen to a married couple he knew socially after hearing they were struggling to conceive. He also preened and puffed about the quality of his sperm, noting his many children—the Times noted he has at least 11.
To unite his sprawling network of heirs in one place, Musk has begun buying up adjoining mansions in Austin, Texas. The Times—citing four people aware of his aims—said they are the cornerstone of a future compound where he envisions his children and two of their three mothers living a stone’s throw away from each other.
Musk’s anxieties are also expressed in the campaign of former President Donald Trump, whom he has spent tens of millions of his own wealth supporting, including through a super PAC that’s been charged with a major role in Republican get-out-the-vote efforts.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), has repeatedly expressed alarm about declining birth rates in the United States going back to the launch of his political career in 2001.
Vance infamously branded professional women without kids as “childless cat ladies.” One hopes those women never ended up at a dinner party with Elon Musk.
