Elon Musk is not only the world’s richest man; to many, he is also one of its most influential. His rise began far from Silicon Valley: the son of a model and an electromechanical engineer, he grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, before studying at the University of Pennsylvania and later heading to Stanford, the launchpad for what became a legendary career in technology.
But a new documentary paints a far more unsettling portrait of the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire. According to the mother of one of his children, Musk is a “Gatling gun of sperm” intent on producing a generation of “mini-Musks” before what he allegedly believes could be a future “civil war,” by having children with young women who share suitably Right-wing views.
His first wife, Justine Wilson, who had six children with him, says in the film: “I feel like we [women] are pretty much interchangeable to him. I heard that he refers to us as ‘the breeders.’”
Former girlfriend Ashley St Clair, who had a son, Romulus, with Musk in September 2024, makes an even more explosive claim. “He told me that he wanted to create a legion of children before the civil war,” she says. “He had [Twitter] messages from girls who he had offered to father children with. It’s like a Gatling gun of sperm in his direct messages.”
Apocalyptic ideas appear to loom large in the world view of the 55-year-old entrepreneur, whose companies include Tesla, SpaceX and X. Yet the documentary suggests Musk may be insulated from ordinary fears about the end of the world by another belief: that reality itself is merely a simulation, and that machines have been keeping humans as their “pets” — a view he is said to have shared with Nobel Prize-winning British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton.
If those revelations sound remarkable, they are only part of the story told in Musk, a nearly four-hour documentary that premiered yesterday at the Venice Film Festival.
The film also alleges that Musk has made extraordinary false claims about his businesses in ways that helped drive up the value of his stock. One of the central accusations concerns Tesla’s so-called “self-driving” cars, which the documentary says were presented as capable of operating without driver oversight — a claim linked in the film to around 60 deaths and numerous lawsuits in the United States.
Another alleged exaggeration concerns Musk’s long-promised ambition to colonise Mars, a project that, according to critics featured in the documentary, has been described as imminent for roughly a decade.
Elon Musk started his tech career at Stanford – which has made him a multibillionaire, and even a trillionaire briefly in June
Former girlfriend Ashley St Clair said of Elon: ‘He told me that he wanted to create a legion of children before the civil war’
Then there’s the ‘classic con’ allegedly related to claims in 2013 that owners of Tesla electric cars could swap in a freshly charged battery pack in a matter of minutes ‘faster than you could fill a gas tank’.
The firm banked $11 billion (£8 billion) in carbon credits in California as a result, but there was never any widespread capability to carry out the scheme in the way it was sold to the public. Author Cory Doctorow says in the film: ‘It was like showing someone a roll of singles with a single $100 bill on the top.’
We also hear new claims that he is bent on world domination via his Starlink satellites. (There are currently around 11,000 in orbit that control internet access across the globe.) That he may have harvested data about American citizens during the DOGE era and is ‘going to use this data to corrupt the forthcoming mid-term elections’.
DOGE, remember, was the brief time when he was part of President Donald Trump’s inner circle, running the Department of Government Efficiency, which promised to cut $2 trillion (£1.5 trillion) from the federal budget – an endeavour that was, in the end, a toothless failure.
DOGE succeeded in slashing staff and foreign aid, but had no effect on the US national deficit and Musk quit after four months, saying the government was ‘unfixable’.
Musk’s (brief) time at DOGE comes under scrutiny in the film, too. St Clair, a 28-year-old author and influencer who met Musk on X before having his child, tells the filmmakers that Musk was curiously certain that Trump was going to win the 2024 election, and left the election night party at Mar-a-Lago long before the results were declared.
‘He said: “I knew it [the result] hours ago.” The degree of certainty he had, I had never seen before,’ she says.
The documentary also examines his buying of Twitter, now X, in 2022 which promptly lost 80 per cent of its value.
Musk’s (brief) time at DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency – comes under scrutiny in the film too
Musk was said to have been ‘freaking out’ about the documentary before it was screened in Venice. Indeed during yesterday’s press conference St Clair claimed he offered her $40 million (£30 million) not to take part. Musk was given the chance to comment and declined to be part of the film. His response afterwards, posted on X, was simply ‘LMFAO’, or Laughing My F*****g Ass Off.
He may claim to find the scrutiny hilarious, but the talking heads in the film, including his first wife, a number of ex-friends, and a one-time colleague at NASA, all believe he may be the most dangerous man in the world as well as the richest.
One early casualty of Musk’s brutal attitude towards the human condition is Justine, his first wife, whom he married in 2000. She recalls: ‘As we danced at our wedding Elon told me: “I am the Alpha in this relationship.” He was constantly reminding me that I was lacking. He said to me if you were my employee then I would fire you.’
Two years into their eight-year marriage, their first-born son Nevada Alexander died of sudden infant death syndrome when he was just ten weeks. In a tweet, Musk said he held him in his arms as he died and felt his last heartbeat. But in the film, Justine says she was holding Nevada at the time, at the hospital.
She went on to have twins, by IVF, and then triplets. However, the happy family which she longed for never materialised. ‘There was a sense of distance and, to be honest, a sense of contempt on Elon’s part.
‘It was war peace war peace. I learned of the term gaslighting in my relationship with Elon.’
Within a month of their separation in 2008, he met little-known British actress Talulah Riley – then 25 to his 41 – whom he married in 2010, divorced, married again, and then divorced again. They did not have children.
He then struck up a relationship with 30-year-old Canadian singer Grimes (real name Claire Boucher).
The liaison started with flirty, pseudo-intellectual tweets and the couple made their public debut at the Met Gala Ball in New York in May 2018. Son X arrived in 2020. At the time, Grimes called her lover ‘a super goddam interesting person’.
But there were inklings of Musk’s transformation that year, as he declared that ‘pronouns suck’ and the word ‘cis’ – meaning someone whose gender identity matches their biological sex – was a ‘slur’.
Grimes was appalled, and wrote: ‘I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.’
But it was. Musk started to espouse some seriously controversial views. One former friend says that the combination of the Covid pandemic and Musk’s ‘addiction’ to his popularity on X changed him as a person.
In the film author and neuroscientist Sam Harris says: ‘He started to behave in ways that were incomprehensible to me.’ Tech journalist Kara Swisher says: ‘He thinks he is just a higher being.’
In December 2020, Musk moved to Texas, and opened a huge Tesla factory in Austin. Some $50 million (£37 million) was funnelled to TV advertisements for a Right-wing, anti-progressive pressure group called Citizens for Sanity.
Musk spoke of the ‘woke mind virus’ and blamed this for the decision of his son Xavier from his first marriage to transition to live as a woman called Jenna at 18.
Former wife Justine says: ‘It was painful to watch her being in pain. He never tried to repair things – that’s not in his nature. If a relationship ruptures then it ruptures. She really had to fight to go her own way. Elon said to me one day: “Make sure Jenna knows how much I love her.” The next day he cut off her health insurance.’
By this point there were further complications on the horizon. Shivon Zilis, a director of operations at Musk’s company Neuralink, had twins with him via IVF in November 2021. This was a month before his daughter with Grimes was born, also via surrogacy. She was named Exa Dark Siderael. Musk said on Twitter: ‘Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilisation faces by far.’
At this point, Grimes and Musk had broken up, but the relationship remained ‘fluid’. During an off period, Grimes filed a petition to ‘determine parental relationship’ with Musk in April 2022 – a legal attempt to officially identify the mother and father of a child.
Within weeks of the birth of their third child, Techno Mechanicus – nicknamed Tau – in June 2022, Musk sued Grimes to ‘establish a parent-child relationship’ with the three children after he learned that the youngest two would not be returning to his home in Texas and that Grimes was keeping them in California. He kept their son X.
Grimes counter-sued Musk, asking for primary physical custody of all three children and joint custody. Shortly after that, Grimes publicly pleaded for parental access to X after seeing a photo of Musk with Shivon Zilis and their two children. Apparently, she’d only learned of their birth in a report on US news site Business Insider.
At an August 2024 hearing to determine custody, Musk said the children were settled in Austin and attending school there.
St Clair said: ‘I would see interactions that Elon was having with Claire [Grimes] that were concerning. Claire was texting him pleading about a situation with little X and he would just say “I’m blocking you.” He took that damn baby from her.’
St Clair adds that, after Romulus was born, their romance was over. She tells the documentary: ‘He was very kind, but from the moment I had our kid it was all gone.’
Musk’s fixer and right-hand man Jared Birchall was sent to strike a deal with St Clair in the form of a ‘child support agreement’, which included clauses preventing her from speaking about him. It was worth a $15million (£11million) lump sum plus $100,000 (£74,000) a month. In audio between Birchall and St Clair in the documentary, she asks: ‘Did the other mothers sign one?’
After being told yes, she says: ‘They don’t seem happy.’ Birchall responds: ‘I don’t think a drugged-out musician is capable of finding true happiness. I think Shivon goes in and out of finding contentment. Elon is very kind and generous but when a mother of his children and a woman whom he trusted decides to go the legal route, it always leads to a worse outcome for the women.’
After refusing to sign, her payments went from $100,000 a month to $40,000 and now to $20,000. ‘He was intelligent and successful but he was definitely strange,’ she says now of Musk.
‘One time we were together and he was falling asleep with a podcast on about Kublai Khan.’ According to legend, the 13th-century Mongol emperor, and grandson of Genghis Khan, had 47 sons.
Sam Harris, the podcaster and a former friend of Musk says: ‘We are living in a world where one person’s psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequence in our politics, in our economy, in our geopolitics.
‘It’s completely insane we have one person who is this chaotic — who’s completely unelected — and has this much power.’
Alex Gibney – the man who made the documentary – concurs. ‘People assume because he’s very rich that he’s not crazy. But the terrifying thing might be that he’s crazy and he’s very rich and powerful. That’s the warning bell the film sounds.’
