‘Justice’: Influencer gives Elon Musk a taste of his own medicine with baby bombshell
The world’s richest man has been spectacularly brought down a peg by a woman no one had even heard of just a few days ago.
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OPINION
Revenge. Justice. Just desserts. Served hot, cold or at limp room temperature, I’ll take it all.
Because Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has just gotten a delicious taste of his own medicine.
He is quite literally reaping what he has sown. Should we all rub our hands with schadenfreude-ish glee? Oh yes, please. I promise you, it will be fun.
Until now, it had seemed like it was nigh on impossible for anything to even remotely touch the 53-year-old, who has become the de facto leader of the free world and power behind Donald Trump’s throne.
MORE: Elon Musk’s bizarre move with ex-partner Grimes exposed
This week, he proved he is impervious to the US courts, which ruled that Mr Musk – an unelected first-time political dabbler – has every right to fire thousands of federal employees via his pet Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which continues to glory in its license to dismantle the US piece by piece.
What – who – how could anything or anyone take Mr Musk down a peg or two, or penetrate the world he has neatly arranged to suit his own endlessly, grossly, nakedly self-serving plans?
Enter 26-year-old sometime Fox News commentator and conservative influencer Ashley St Clair who, with one post on X, managed to have a red hot crack at doing exactly that.
Had anyone, prior to last week, actually heard of Ms St Clair, a woman whose name sounds like she pens romance novels where dukes ravage hitherto overlooked but actually quite pretty ducks?
No, but despite the decks being heavily stacked against her, Ms St Clair still managed to do the extraordinary: To turn the tables on the oddly undercooked-looking Mr Musk and borrow from his own playbook to her own ends.
This all started when Ms St Clair popped up on the internet last Friday to announce she is the mother of Mr Musk’s 13th child, a baby boy, who she says was born five months ago.
“I have not previously disclosed this to protect our child’s privacy and safety,” she wrote on X, “but in recent days it has become clear that tabloid media intends to do so, regardless of the harm it will cause”.
She later added: “Elon, we have been trying to communicate for the past several days and you have not responded”.
The world, to start with, just shrugged. Mr Musk already has 12 confirmed children with three women.
At one point in 2021, three women who had or were carrying his children – Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis, a surrogate carrying the child of Mr Musk and singer Grimes (real name Claire Boucher) and Ms Boucher herself – were all reportedly in the same Austin hospital maternity ward.
Mr Musk is to fatherhood what Ronald McDonald is to burgers. Famous for it, prolific and very, very average at it.
Anyhoo, after Ms St Clair’s bombshell, Mr Musk then did the mature thing and stuck his fingers in both his ears while a flurry of personal assistants (the correct collective noun) dashed about lining up fresh cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke. (Which is actually what the man drinks. Who needs Chateau d’Yquem when you have artificial brown water?)
Since then, the closest that the Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink boss has come to reacting to Ms St Clair’s claim was commenting “woah” after Milo Yiannopoulos (the mouthpiece for self-described “Nazi” Kanye West) went after her.
Mr Musk then said he would be “offline” for the weekend to fiddle around with some AI he had found in his bottom desk drawer.
Gadzooks!
For one thing, Ms St Clair got Mr Musk to put his phone down, stop tweeting and pull his head in. Even if it was for a weekend, I’ll happily chalk this one up to a win for the world.
But, bigger picture, Ms St Clair has done something much more important – she has shown us we don’t need to buy into Mr Musk’s own self-mythology.
Resistance is not futile. The shield that seems to exist around him is not impenetrable.
What Ms St Clair has done is blow a hole in the shimmering mirage that is the idea that no one can puncture his world, or that he gets to now and forevermore control the narrative.
He doesn’t get to – and more importantly, can’t – control everything.
Mr Musk is constantly arranging the world to suit him – and now, a woman who no one had ever heard of last week has done the same thing. David, meet a very MAGA-y Goliath.
Since that X post, Ms St Clair has continued to fight back and publicity-wise she is, if not quite winning, at least proving that Mr Musk can be taken on.
She is the mouse that has just done some moderate roaring and proven that the ostensibly almighty billionaire is not infallible; that despite his god-sized ego and his wealth he doesn’t get to run the entire show.
It’s like that bit in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy pulls back the curtain – and finds that it’s just a man. A man hiding behind a great big shiny edifice he has built around himself.
What this situation also spells out is the extent to which he is an inveterate user.
Mr Musk has used countless women (including wives Justine Wilson and actress Tallulah Riley, whom he married and divorced twice).
He has toyed with the lives of the 6000 Twitter staffers who lost their jobs and tunnelled his way through the actual earth under Los Angeles and Las Vegas where his Boring Company has been drill baby drilling.
He has messed with the 140,000 employees of Tesla who are unprotected by anything like a union, and since Donald Trump’s sticky-fingered return to political office, he’s also playing with the entire bureaucracy of the US government including, if he gets his way, the tax and social security of all 350 million Americans.
Weeee!
People, the world, real lives – they have, until now, all been playthings to be tossed away when he is bored with them. Like a toddler, he makes messes whenever and wherever he wants. The ego-centrism of his approach to life is truly breathtaking.
Throughout this all too, Mr Musk has shown himself to be the juvenile he really is.
Ms St Clair has not backed down nor bent in the face of his unthinkable wealth.
When another X account shared underage photos of her, she wrote to Mr Musk, “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?”
Here’s the delicious irony as Mr Musk now finds himself in the most scrumptious bind.
For years now, he has fervently, ickily pushed a pronatalist agenda, children being, to his way of thinking, a moral imperative that liberals are shirking to hedonistically chug kombucha and feel all their feelings.
However, pronatalism is not just about Bible-thumping good ol’ boy values where women know their place (kitchens, horizontal) but race too, with a declining birthrate in Western countries.
With the St Clair situation that has now come back to bite him somewhere very sensitive and private, Mr Musk, having nailed his colours to this fecund mast, has laid himself wide open to be accused by anyone, anywhere of fathering their children.
Just in case anyone might think that that way the path of great riches lies, it has previously been reported that he paid his first wife, Canadian author Wilson and mother of his first five children, only $31,500 a month in child support. Meanwhile, he earns more than $36 million a minute.
Talk about father of the year stuff.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
Originally published as ‘Justice’: Influencer gives Elon Musk a taste of his own medicine with baby bombshell
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