Did Elon Musk Wander Into the Federal Government Straight Out of a Ray Bradbury Story?

Good god. The president is showing unmistakable signs of dementia-related complications that seem to involve settling old scores, real and imagined. And the guy he's put in charge of dismantling the federal government is an absolute freak who has wandered into government service from a Ray Bradbury story. God bless America, 'cause we gon' need it.

From The Wall Street Journal, and with my profound apologies for making you take a shower in the middle of the day.

“I don’t want my son to feel like he’s a secret,” St. Clair told Birchall in a two-hour phone call in December. Birchall offered St. Clair some advice. His boss was a “very big-hearted, kind and generous person,” he said. But Musk had a different side. When a mother of his child goes “the legal route” in these discussions, “that always, always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise,” Birchall told the 26-year-old. Plus, he said, Musk wasn’t sure the child was his.

It wasn’t the first such conversation for Birchall. His public job is running Musk’s family office, and he recently helped organize Musk’s more than $250 million push in support of Donald Trump’s election. Behind the scenes, Birchall also manages the financial and privacy deals Musk wants for the women raising the world’s richest man’s babies...Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known.

Go for throttle up.

Musk’s baby-making project is relevant to his ambition for NASA, which he wants to move faster to go to Mars. He said on X that making people multiplanetary is “critical to ensuring the long-term survival of humanity and all life as we know it.” In Musk’s dark view of the world, civilization is under threat because of a declining population. He is driven to correct the historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence, according to people familiar with the matter. His businesses are set up to serve the idea: The main objective of SpaceX is to build a rocket ship capable of getting to Mars, and his other companies, including electric-car maker Tesla, help finance the plan.

I think we've achieved escape velocity.

Musk refers to his offspring as a “legion,” a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire. During St. Clair’s pregnancy, Musk suggested that they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.” He has recruited potential mothers on his social-media platform X, according to some of the people. Musk has used his wealth to buy the silence of some women who have his kids, according to St. Clair as well as other people, text messages and documents reviewed by the Journal.

And whatever happened to romance?

Musk has warned that “civilization is going to crumble” if people don’t start having more children, a view popularized as pronatalism in right-wing circles. The pronatalism movement is composed of people concerned about the birthrate and eager to implement policy and cultural solutions to the problem. Martin Varsavsky, a friend of Musk’s who founded a large chain of in vitro fertilization clinics in the U.S., said he has spoken with Musk about the risks of falling birthrates. “Without babies there’s no future, every problem becomes secondary to the problem of not having people on the planet,” said Varsavsky. “Elon believes that a country is not the geography, a country is the people.”

Pardon me, but my skin just crawled out the door. I need to catch it before it wanders into traffic.

One of the most important ways to change these dynamics, he has repeatedly told people close to him, is for educated people to have more children. In 2023, he had a meeting in Austin where people he described as Japanese officials asked him to be a sperm donor for a high-profile woman, according to a text message reviewed by the Journal. “They want me to be a sperm donor. No romance or anything, just sperm,” he texted St. Clair. Musk later told her he gave his sperm to the person who asked for it, without naming the woman.

Damn. Too late.

The rest of the report deals with Musk's relationships with the various women he has graced with a supporting role in his great project. It is every bit as strange as any other part of this saga. There simply has been nobody in the history of the high councils of the American government as completely weird as this giver of his blessed jism. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.