Elon Musk takes his 4-year-old son to work. Why?

The billionaire has described ‘Lil X’ as his ‘cuteness prop’ – but his mother seems less delighted.

Elon Musk with his son, X. Picture: AFP

Elon Musk conducted a 30-minute press conference from the White House’s Oval Office, with X Æ A-Xii, or X for short, his four-year-old son, mostly perching on his shoulders. It looked somewhat like the Pixar movie Ratatouille, in which an adorably intelligent rat sits on the head of a man to direct his every move.

The smallest human in the most powerful room was garnering the most attention, directing his father’s head in certain directions, at one point even using this highest perch to order someone to “shut your mouth”.

Let’s pause to consider the purpose Musk’s “mini me” son serves in this unusual scenario. It is, in fact, a scenario normal for Musk and X, the seventh of his 12 children and the one singled out by the richest man on Earth as his “protege” almost from birth, anointing him with his favourite letter of the alphabet.

Musk’s fanbase adore the near-constant presence of “Lil X”, as Musk likes to call him, presumably to differentiate from his social media platform or his ex-wives. Walter Isaacson, Musk’s biographer, wrote in his book Elon Musk about seeing him bring X to an evening meeting with the directors of NASA in 2022. Musk said that X was his “cuteness prop”.

X also serves as a visual aid to his father’s pronatalist views. Musk saying to a reporter in the Oval Office, “I’m not sure we should be sending $US50 million of condoms to anywhere,” while his son pokes his fingers in Musk’s ears makes for a very layered argument.

But while President Trump enjoys working with his offspring in adulthood, he has gone on record with his more Victorian attitudes to small children and especially hands-on fathering. Let’s not even begin to imagine the reaction if a female politician put on this display of making so many days a “bring your child to work” day.

In 2005, while his wife, Melania, was pregnant with their son, Barron, Trump said that for a man to be hands-on with childcare made him “like the wife”. That year Trump told the radio host Howard Stern, “I won’t do anything to take care of them. I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m going to be walking the kids down Central Park.” Or, as Isaacson put it of Musk, make them a “constant companion” at business launches, conferences and design meetings.

But perhaps both Trump and Musk are colluding in the idea that X is not really a child at all. At the press conference he was dressed in a shirt and coat and Trump called him a “high-IQ individual”. Musk has said of X on X (see how confusing this is?), “Lil X is my emotional support human.”

Musk and his son joined Donald Trump in the Oval Office earlier this week. Picture: AFP

The idea that X was not a child, with the needs of children, but a trained care worker for a father with self-confessed “stormy” emotional needs was no doubt a joke. However, Isaacson wrote that almost as soon as X was born, to the singer Grimes, Musk considered him something special, and described how the baby had a medicating effect on his father.

He “had an otherworldly sweetness that calmed and beguiled Musk, who craved his presence”, Isaacson wrote. “He took X everywhere.” From infancy X accompanied Musk through a demanding work schedule, sitting on his lap at meetings, dancing on conference tables, attending film premieres. His first words, according to Musk in the book, were “car, rocket and daddy”. Musk talks of X learning to count down from 10, owing to his attendance at so many rocket launches, before he counted from one. “I’m not sure he can count forward,” Musk told one meeting when X was two.

This has concerned his mother: Musk’s commandeering of X appears to be a contentious aspect of their year-long custody dispute, now settled. (Musk is not with X full time: the use of nannies was revealed in the court documents.) In September 2023 Grimes posted to Isaacson on X, “Tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer.” She soon deleted it. That month Musk was filmed with X on his lap in a meeting with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan asked where Musk’s “wife” was. Musk said: “We’re separated, I take care of him mostly.”

In January 2024 Musk was even pictured with X perched on his shoulders at Auschwitz, injecting a jarring note of “dad at a theme park”. Official guidelines say that the memorial site is not recommended for children under 14.

Meeting the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2023. Picture: Getty Images

Visiting Auschwitz in 2024. Picture: Reuters

Grimes was alerted to Musk’s most recent display of their elder son before the world’s media in the Oval Office by a comment on X (the social media platform).

“He should not be in public like this,” Grimes wrote in reply. “I did not see this, thank u for alerting me. But I’m glad he was polite. Sigh.”

The 36-year-old shares three children with Musk: X, a daughter, Exa Dark Sideræl, three, and another son, Techno Mechanicus, two. But Musk’s attitude to X is strikingly different to his other children. Grimes acknowledged this in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2022, when X was almost two and the couple were more amicable.

“Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is just out there. I mean, I think E is really seeing him as a protege and bringing him to everything,” she said.

Grimes also told the interviewer that she had foreboding for X. She was fascinated by the movie Dune and the character of Paul Atreides, played by Timothee Chalamet. He is the son of a duke, the heir to the ruler of the planet, trained to become a great leader and burdened by it.

“When I see X,” Grimes said, “like, I just know X is going to have to go through all this really f--ked-up shit that sort of mirrors Paul-type stuff.” Watching it made her upset thinking of X’s singular destiny: “I was just crying my eyes out the whole movie.”

X with his mother, Grimes, in 2023. Picture: The Mega Agency/The Times

Grimes’s brother then tells the interviewer that even though this idea of X as a kind of princeling sounds grandiose, it is quite plausible.

“I feel like there’s very few people in the world who could have similar sentiments about their son,” Mac Boucher said.

The second child of Musk and Grimes got, by comparison, fairly short shrift. Isaacson describes the special moment when Musk and Grimes came home from the hospital with their daughter to introduce her to X. They had an hour of family time. Musk didn’t mention to Grimes that he had secretly had twins with another woman, but no matter, that was enough sibling bonding.

“He scooped up X,” Isaacson wrote, “and took him on his jet to New York, where the toddler sat on his lap at the Time magazine ceremony anointing him Person of the Year.”

In a documentary about Musk, The Elon Musk Show, there is rare video footage of his early parenting that shows him in a far more aloof mode. He is at home with Talulah Riley, the British actor then in her early twenties and new to the role of stepmother to his five children – a set of twins and a set of triplets – he had with his first wife, Justine Wilson.

One of Musk’s sons violently wrenches a mobile phone from his brother, who wails at the injustice. Musk looks at the thief with an amused laugh and does not intervene.

It has been speculated that some of Musk’s recent behaviour, including his shift to the political right, stems from the hostility of his transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, who publicly denounces Musk as a poor father. She said, removing “Musk” from her name, that she did not “wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.

Unlike Trump’s offspring, Musk’s eldest five children, now all over 18, do not choose to appear with their father in public.

Musk has repeatedly expressed how his lonely childhood instilled in him a desire that he “never be alone”. His close working life with his 4-year-old, or the person Isaacson describes as Musk’s “cheerful energiser”, means that desire is met. Towards the end of Isaacson’s book Musk is shown directing X to look through a telescope trained on Mars.

“Look at this,” Musk tells his son. “This is where you are going to live someday.”

The Times