Sad revelation about Elon Musk’s 9 children

The Tesla and SpaceX founder was recently revealed to have secretly fathered twins with a company executive proving a sad fact about modern day parenthood.

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If there is one thing that Elon Musk is superlative at, more so than pushing for the stars or turning out electric cars or trying to revolutionise mass-transit via the hyperloop, it is generating legal fees in the squillions.

There have been two big Musk stories in the past week and both of which will, very likely, only result in hordes of lawyers rubbing their hands with glee and debating the merits of a third yacht.

First, Musk, 51, pulled out of his capricious $65.4 billion deal to buy Twitter this week in a move guaranteed to see him in a Delaware courtroom while secondly, in Texas, it was revealed he has secretly fathered two children with one of his executives.

The news that Neuralink’s Shivon Zilis had welcomed twins with the mogul brings his total number of (known) children to nine. He shares five living children with his former wife Talulah Riley, along with a son and a daughter with pop star Grimes, real name Claire Boucher. In fact, it turns out that Zilis’ twins were born only weeks before Musk and Boucher’s second child, born via surrogate, arrived late last year.

Elon Musk with one of his two children with Grimes. Picture: Twitter

Shivon Zilis, the top exec who welcoming twins with Musk earlier this year. Picture: Twitter

The Musk family’s growing headcount has largely been written off as Musk being Musk, an eccentric genius and permanently entertaining individualist who seems to take a fair amount of pleasure in generally sowing chaos (and it would seem, oats).

That’s why the general reaction to the news of Musk’s secret twins seems to be ‘oh Elon!’ followed by cheeky finger wag and a chortle.

But imagine for a moment what the reaction would be like if this was a female CEO we were talking about?

Let’s call her Elona, shall we? She’s a rule-breaking iconoclast whose creativity and extreme work ethic has seen her rocket to the top of the business stratosphere, earning her hundreds of billions along the way. She is a modern-day Edison who loves Burning Man and just happens to have had nine children, including three pretty much at the same time, via three different men. The last four were born in only the last two years and all while she was trying to colonise Mars just like you know who.

Elona, like Musk, could afford teams of nannies to work around the clock to make sure her kids were safe and happy; Elona could obviously financially ensure her three different families’ every want and whim would be taken care of.

But while Musk’s ream of children is written off as just another oddity and quirk of a brilliant man, Elona would be cast as abominably selfish for carelessly acquiring children the way other billionaires pick up lesser Picassos.

Elon Musk and Grimes have two children together. Picture: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

She would be routinely castigated for playing little if no role in her children’s lives and for demonstrating zero regard for her kids’ emotional wellbeing, even if all three sets of their fathers were the primary caregivers.

Musk has gotten an entirely free pass over his lethargic parenting style; meanwhile screeching voices would be so loudly decrying our Elona’s extreme self-centredness that it would temporarily at least blot out all of her professional achievements, even if she had managed to land a rocket on Saturn and create a solar-powered submarine.

Elona would be broadly viewed as self-centred and even cruel for adding to her brood with a certain lackadaisical wilfulness and the knowledge she will only ever play a negligible role (at best) in their upbringings.

Next, imagine that, like Musk, Elona was into her sixth decade and dating a person more than 20 years her junior, just as the Tesla boss is right now. (In fact, in the last six years, Musk has had relationships with Riley, Amber Heard, Boucher, and now Australian actress Natasha Bassett.) Our Elona? There simply aren’t enough synonyms for ‘slut’ in the English language to fully cover the sort of treatment she would be subjected to here.

Beyond all of the “won’t someone think of the children” bleating, Elona would be cast as someone too busy between the sheets to ever balance the books; too enthusiastic to spend time in the bedroom to be able to cut it in the boardroom.

Her sex and family lives would not be a footnote to her professional achievements or add to her mystic as a genuinely brilliant freethinker as they do with Musk but would overtake all of her professional success. Every lead sentence of every article forever more would open with, ‘Elona Musk, CEO of Blah Blah and mother of nine’.

Will Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal be covering our mate Musk like this? Of course not. He’s got space to conquer.

Musk was romantically linked to Amber Heard. Picture: Supplied

The double standards at play here pile up faster than paternity suits in Musk’s lawyer’s inbox.

Elona’s messiness, if not downright sloppiness, in her personal life would be seen as indicative of how well she could do her job and she would automatically find her moral fibre and ability to run a trillion-dollar juggernaut called relentlessly into question.

In reality, Musk’s promiscuity and flock of children have not, and will never have, any impact whatsoever on his professional standing or how seriously investors take him. He will always be measured and defined by what he has achieved in the business and tech worlds not by how differently and regularly he procreates.

At the end of the day, managing to conceive three children with two mothers at the same time only adds to Musk’s self-mythologising as a modern-day radical; a woman in exactly the same scenario would be thrown to the censorious wolves.

Male leaders are allowed to have messy personal lives without anyone for a moment thinking their faulty zipper has any bearing on their ability to do their job or make their shareholders billions. They can have divorces, affairs, and secret children and no one will ever question how they manage their time or if their choices reflect on their ability to lead. It is somehow easy and obvious to demarcate between the private and the public.

That latitude and sophistication of thinking is one that female leaders are never afforded.

What lies at the heart of all of this is that a woman who is a bad mother is judged in a way that a man who is a bad father never is and never will be.

If Musk was a woman, he would be slut-shamed into oblivion. Picture: Angela Weiss / AFP

Wildly successful men who are parents are given social leeway to be absent, negligent and solipsistic; wildly successful women who are parents are absolutely not.

So enjoy Elon. Enjoy your billions and your phallic rockets and your increasingly sad clinging-to-last-vestige-of-youth haircuts and maybe just maybe one day think about enjoying being a father. Might save on some other lawyers’ bills down the track.

Daniela Elser is a writer with 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.