“Elon Musk has financially retaliated against his own child and reduced his financial support substantially and unilaterally,” Karen Rosenthal, of Bikel Rosenthal & Schanfield LLP, told People on Thursday. “He did this after Ashley was forced to bring this matter to court, when he refused to respond to her many private attempts to resolve this matter without publicity.”
Rosenthal also alleges that Musk has tried to slap a gag order on St. Clair, which is pending in court. “Ashley is vigorously opposing this application in order to preserve her right to speak out. All while Mr. Musk fashions himself a first amendment warrior and freely communicates via his owned social media platform,” Rosenthal’s legal team said. “Given that Mr. Musk is dedicated to transparency in government, it would be helpful if he administered his own life by the same principles.” To be clear, Musk is not, in fact, “dedicated to transparency in government”—he’s dedicated to hacking it to bits for his own enrichment, but I digress.
St. Clair and Musk reportedly began a romantic relationship in May 2023 and conceived their child in January 2024. Shortly after St. Clair revealed their child in February, she filed for sole custody of their son. As part of this legal action, St. Clair shared a trove of screenshotted texts between her and Musk, which show him asking her for more children: “I want to knock you up again,” he wrote in one message. “Well, we do have a legion of kids to make,” he wrote in another. St. Clair’s legal complaint additionally notes that Musk wasn’t present for the child’s birth—all he did was send a text message that said “All well?” afterward. Per St. Clair, he’s only met their son three times and isn’t involved in caring for or raising the child.
Musk has 14 known children, including three with Grimes and four with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis. St. Clair is hardly alone in struggling to co-parent with Musk: Just last month, Grimes had to tweet at Musk about their child’s medical emergency, claiming she had no choice because Musk wasn’t responding to her messages. At the time, Musk appeared to be partying at CPAC and waving a chainsaw on stage as he bragged about cutting Medicaid and Social Security. Instead of responding to Grimes’ tweets, Musk appeared to have Grimes’ posts hidden from Twitter, which he owns. Meanwhile, one of Musk’s daughters is estranged from him and has referred to him as “a pathetic man-child.”
Musk, who has an alleged, creepy history of pressuring employees and Taylor Swift to have children with him, has tried to frame his addiction to procreation as some benevolent act to save humanity from extinction: “I’m doing my part haha,” he tweeted in June 2022, upon the then-revelation that he and Zilis had twins. In reality, of course, if people are having fewer kids, it’s because of the dystopian fucking hellscape that Musk’s wealth hoarding and electoral meddling are creating. And he can very much look to his own treatment of the mothers of his children for insight into why someone might be less inclined to procreate.
