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If the reversal of declining birthrates is genuinely a preoccupation of Elon Musk’s, recent reviews suggest that the exhibition of his four-year-old son, “X”, may not be the most effective fertility stimulus.
That there is more chance of the exact opposite, a global stampede for contraceptives, remains likely even if X can be persuaded not to pick his nose and, as the world witnessed last week, idly consume its contents beside the US president’s Resolute desk. I say “idly”. Donald Trump, in attendance, introduced X as “a high IQ individual”. Behind his show of mucoid innocence, the prodigy may have been reflecting, with wry amusement at the double standards, that no woman in his father’s role would get away with bringing a docile child to a presidential press conference, still less one as irksome as himself.
Did Ursula von der Leyen, for instance, ever showcase even one of her seven children at a political event? No, X probably figured, she can’t have: she made it to president of the European Commission.
Health note: if these X visits are to be a regular thing, Trump’s staff may want to consider that nose picking is a major source of colonisation by Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria, from which older people, such as the self-styled “germaphobe” president, 78, are particularly at risk. The contaminated desk has already been removed for cleaning: ideally it should be replaced with one of a low height and anti-bacterial material better suited to occupants of the Little Fascists day nursery. It was noted that, immediately after X’s performance, the president selected the least repulsive child from available Trumps, and presented the five-year-old, dressed in a Maga cap, for public inspection at the Daytona 500 racetrack. “President Trump has just shown his soft side as he held hands with his sweet granddaughter,” Hello! magazine obliged.
In a 2023 biography that now reads like an extended warning, Walter Isaacson details Musk’s evangelism about the birthrate. “People are going to have to revive the idea of having children as a kind of social duty,” Musk advised in 2014, “otherwise civilisation will just die.” At a time when he was not collaborating with the greatest current threat to human civilisation, this exhortation may have sounded only moderately grotesque. Nor, before X, was the notion of Musk, X proprietor, as an authority on social duty, such an obvious oxymoron. Once, he thought, “Trump might be one of the world’s best bullshitters ever”.
For consistency in human production, however, Musk cannot be faulted. His output totals at least 12, with surrogate mothers occasionally employed on the assembly line. He encouraged his sister to reproduce, Isaacson says, and when she agreed, Musk “helped find her a clinic, pick out an anonymous sperm donor, and pay for the procedure”. Last year Musk used his X platform to offer his gametes – “I will give you a child” – to Taylor Swift.
“He really wants smart people to have kids,” says his colleague Shivon Zilis, the mother of three Musks. In a development that suggested to his tickled biographer a “new-age French farce”, Zilis’s hospitalisation before the birth of twins (created in vitro) was in the same clinic where a surrogate mother, unnamed, would imminently deliver his second child (Exa Dark Sideræl, AKA “Y”) with the singer Grimes.
“I can’t possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children,” Zilis says. The many pluses evidently outweighing unavoidable genetic input from Musk’s father, Errol, described by Isaacson as “an engineer, rogue and charismatic fantasist who to this day bedevils Elon”. Last week her twins were selected with X, Musk’s usual accessory, to meet the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi.
When they are old enough to ask why public revulsion did not put a stop to their exhibition without consent, the baby Musketeers will discover that, regardless of increasing anxiety about over-sharing parents on social media, the children of its highest status exponents are widely considered fair game. When supplied by a sufficiently powerful promoter, the public distribution of child images and anecdotes generally considered regrettable in an Insta culprit can still be recognised as adorable, proofs of parental love. For Fox News, the X routine confirmed Musk’s wish “to spend more time with his children despite his demanding work schedule”. A few days passed before X’s mother, Grimes, who dislikes his public exposure, was attempting to contact Musk on X (“Plz respond”) about a less prominent child’s “medical crisis”.
This habit is nowhere more paradoxical than in the British royal family, where the Waleses, between bouts of mental health outreach, disseminate family news on Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram, which has repeatedly been accused of harming children. Images and footage of mini-royals, formal and otherwise, are circulated in the knowledge that these will be devoured for early signs of character/promise/eccentricity/style, and later, more creepily, for “all grown up” indicators.
Dynastic considerations presumably prevail over consistency and article 16 of the UN convention on the rights of the child: privacy. It was to advance understanding of child development that, last week, the Princess of Wales released drawings by her own children, prompting mainly speculative ecstasy. In 11-year-old George’s sketch, a Telegraph expert detected “impressive command of draughtsmanship”.
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Emulating with their own heirs this parading of blood assets, Musk and Trump advertise a para-regal conviction that they too are beyond common restraints, ethical and professional. Trump, like the toddler-toting Boris Johnson, having now communicated this delusion: “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
True, Musk has been dragging X around his empire for years, no doubt delighting staff resigned to brutal working hours. The delivery of sleep pods has confirmed their perpetuation in Musk’s government department. But the child’s White House debut signals, along with the literal repurposing of the US as a Musk playground, a complete contempt for government inferiors from whom some decorum is expected. Including the Trump family. Even Barron, when they put him on show, doesn’t pick his nose.
Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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