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Notes -
WSJ Article on Elon Musk's Reproductive Habits
(Side note: I know WSJ is paywalled. Can one of you internet heroes find an alt link?)Thanks to @zoink:
Archive Link: https://archive.is/EVkGv
It's pretty weird. Musk, according to the article, references his children, collectively, as his "legion." He has a vision of a sort of compound in Texas for all of the women he's reproduced with along with the children. The cult vibes only get stronger until they run into cold hearted legal recourse. It appears, from the article, that drawn out family court proceedings, estrangement, and some sort of financial settlement are par for the course with Musk. Effective co-parenting or an amicable albeit non-exclusive relationship? Odds are low.
I've always been suspicious of Musk because a few reasons, but I'll decline to elaborate on those specifics in order to bring up a broader culture war point.
While "pronatalism" (loosely defined) is so hot right now on the right, there are some pretty major fractures beneath the surface. A lot of them have to do, unsurprisingly, with the centrality and importance of a stable nuclear family. Next to "the economy" (whatever that may mean), issue and topics of the family, I believe, are of paramount importance when drawing cultural and political lines. In the pronatal sphere, I see a two camp (at least) breakdown:
Have All The Babies All The Time (HAT-BAT) - This is firmly where Musk is king. The idea is simple mathematics with a dash of eugenics; if you are a "worthy man" have as many babies as possible. Multiple women? Fine. Selecting women based on your own rubric of "genetic desirability" also fine. This is where HBDers put their rubber to the road.
Have All The Babies And Raise Them In a Family (HAT-ARF) - This is the providence of traditional religious groups and a particular kind of secular cultural conservative (often, it's kind of hard to distinguish between these two subgroups because the latter will play-act at the religious part without really meaning it).
While it might seem that HAT-BAT and HAT-ARF might be able to leave each to their own and agree on "yay babies," I suspect that HAT-ARF will, quickly, stop to say "wait a minute, you actually have to raise your kids. A ton of data says that broken families have horrible social outcomes." And that right there is a major culture war split.
I'm a pronatalist, in the broadest sense possible, yet I do think it's too much to ask to necessarily tie that to some sort of religious requirement. Yet, I also don't see anyway to build functional societies without a nuclear family as the foundational unit. Spreading The Worthy Male Seed was the de facto method of world population for thousands of years. (Insert the stat here on how everyone in Central Asia is Genghis Khan's grandson/daughter). The result was a lot of continuation of the de facto state of man - war, strife, instability, and short lives. The formalization of monogamous marriage and all of the social and legal codes and laws that fractal out from there was a 2000+ year slow process that resulted in the stabilizing of families, of societies, and preservation of pro-social cultures. Destabilization of the family (sexual revolution etc.) has destabilized society and culture. Looking at it that way, the "Musk Mode" pronatalism is far more regressive that he - or others with similar strategies - would like to admit.
What he's doing entirely makes sense if you're spergy and see bio-essentialism as at least an element of your identity.
Note that his actual relationships have been with hot weirdos like Grimes.
Musk is a Player-Character. Worshipping him is cringe, but so is hating him because it's flavor of the month, doing either makes you definitionally an NPC in the original sense. I remember when he was a fucking darling of the Left just because of braindead EV-boosting.
Cult compound is a bit much, though.
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The data do in fact say that, but they don't really establish whether those outcomes are due to the broken families themselves or to the fact that the kind of people that have broken families have children that are like them.
In fact, when looking at outcomes for kids raised in single parent families due to a factor uncorrelated with the parents' psychological traits (e.g. died in a car accident) you see a much smaller effect than single parent families that are strongly correlated with such traits (e.g. divorced due to infidelity due to poor impulse control).
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According to Razib Khan^^
The true number of his children is at least low hundreds.
I don't think he's making it up and it's also somewhat in line with Elon's single-minded mindest. This is probably going to blow up eventually. I don't think this is bad, at all, depending on the arrangement.
Well, I guess SpaceX's future is secured then. If he went and offered some great deals to smart families, say $10 million for raising a biological child of mine along your other ones, the children are going to be brought up properly and there's decent odds they're going to be exceptionally able.
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Thoughts:
-- It's weird that they make St. Clair out to a/the victim in all this. I have approximately zero sympathy for her in all this. What's with all these conservative influencers being such weird sluts once you wave a few million in front of them? "We already know you're a whore, we're just haggling about the price."
-- There's a recent local crime story that I might or might not write a bigger piece about, but in a nutshell a local teenager ran away from home, her stepdad turned a little nutty harassing people, rumors swirled about allegations of abuse within the family, they found her and she was trying to hustle a living as some kind of e-girl selling pics. In local gossip, someone said something like "Oh, well I guess it turns out the stepdad wasn't abusive, she was just a crazy whore." And I was flabbergasted, "Dude, how do you think fourteen year olds turn into weird whores? It's normally because of abuse in the home..." P(B:A) is pretty strong here. Anyway, I feel the same way about Musk's trans-existence feud with his erstwhile daughter. The Jeff Younger story was illustrative to me: in the divorce proceedings it came out that Younger had done things like pretend to be a PhD uni professor during the dating process and tried to do some kind of weird pseudo boot camp shit whenever he got visitation with his sons. There's a point at which I feel like I run into all these conservative dads who become big culture war talking points saying their sons/daughters were stolen from them, and there's part of me that asks, my brother in Christ, who raised your kids? The sole trans kid I personally grew up with, and know at a family level, had extremely conservative parents.
-- Elon's harem-eunuch complains about problems they've had with "crazy women." Well, yeah, you're gonna get nothing but crazy women when you offer to father a kid on them, in exchange for a bunch of money but no commitment.
-- The reason lots of billionaires don't do this is because they don't want a bunch of heirs. Probably because they actually have some affection for their wives and/or children. Rupert Murdoch has only six or seven kids, and it's a fucking mess out there. Elon doesn't have those kinds of human feelings to worry about, I guess.
It sure is. Check this article out. Even though it was in The Atlantic which makes it kinda a hitpiece on Rupert, his family is pretty much the basis for the tv series Succession.
Oddly, CBS Viacom had an almost parallel series of succession crises when Sumner Redstone stepped down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumner_Redstone?wprov=sfti1#
Just one of those things about media billionaires I guess. All the more reason to imagine how it goes with 20 or more children who have mostly been formally or informally abandoned by their trillionaire father.
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It's not at all "slutting out" if he impregante you via IVF. That is well beyond any reasonable meaning of the word.
You're right, it's much creepier and weirder, and even less related to any kind of humanity or tradition.
I’m all about criticizing it in accurate terms :)
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Anybody tries that on you, tell them "Yes, but I'm not a CHEAP whore, shitbag" (or pick your own insult). Quantity has a quality all its own.
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I think it's really interesting just how much republicans have changed that there's a middle aged man having lots of children and sex outside of marriage and there's almost no response whatsoever from the right. Like the bible is pretty clear about it too as far as I'm aware
Is this a sign that the religious right is meaningfully dead for such an unabashed and open sinner to have clear and direct connections to the Republican president? Or is it a sign that the many of the religious are simply opportunists who wield religion as a weapon against outsiders as many atheists tend to claim?
The president himself is not really an example on those matters
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Sex? They're IVF babies.
And Trump himself put the kibosh on the pro-life folks going after IVF -- he personally stepped in to the Alabama drama over it and talked about how they are making the most beautiful babies - the best babies.
I'm happy to share my impotent response from last year, here in Alabama. Not 100% against the practice, but it still sets off alarms for me.
/images/17448680462132971.webp
Because not too many folks (least of all Trump) “believes that life begins at conception” in the sense you do.
While abortion was the issue; this difference might have been ignored. With that done, the pro-life movement can’t rely on it to paper over fundamental differences.
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At the end of the day, you only get to choose which lizardmen rule over you, don't you?
Hobbits can’t be ruled by hobbits, only as hobbits.
I don't even have anything against that, I'm just asking why are all the elves so much into Eyes Wide Shut orgies, and reproduction via Brave New World horrors?
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I found that Musk's fixer is a Mormon to be one of the piece's more surprising details. Jokes about sisterwives aside, I thought that the ethical obstacles would be far too strong on that one.
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Has been for approaching decades. The religious right was a dying force during the Bush 2 administration, and was regularly losing culture war fights during and before that.
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From a certain perspective, nothing Musk is doing here is all that objectionable. If two consenting adults want to exchange money for privacy or childrearing, I don't see why that shouldn't be allowed.
From another perspective though, a lot of this reads as pretty rapey. Submit to Musk's impregnation ultimatum or he'll financially pummel you? Not a good look, and it'll probably be another attack vector that leftists will wield against him.
I feel like it's a little bit different when he's essentially been the one to give Fong a platform to make money through his attention and whatever jury-rigging they did to the X algorithim to pay her 5-figures a week. It's not like she had an independent business that he's arbitrarily crushing.
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Anyone else have trouble with archive.is captchas?
I've never gotten a captcha from archive.is. Are you on a VPN?
Yes. But archive.org rightly doesn't care about my VPN, so I don't know why other archives do.
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HAT-BAT, taken to scale, would result in many "lesser" men not able to find wives. You could justify it eugenically, but the lesser men could just say "you want a premoral, survival-of-the-fittest world? Let's put aside morality and fight!"
Realistically, Musk's behavior won't scale, it'll just make pronatalism look low-class.
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No, this is where they take off their rubber. SCNR.
There is also a small niche between HAT-BAT and HAT-ARF which are polygynist cultures.
I do not think that it is hard for a billionaire to have a lot of biological children. I mean, sperm banks are a thing, and unless Musk being a jerk is genetic, his genome does not appear to have any big downsides. If he is willing to pay 1M$ in child benefits for any child born from a sperm donation of his, he will likely have more applicants than either his bank account or his testicles can support -- even now that he is enemy number two in coastal cities. For any less controversial billionaire, the advantage would be even clearer: Having the owner of IKEA (or whatever) as your biological father and getting a million might seem like a better deal than having a Nobel laureate as your biological father and getting a signed copy of his autobiography. For lesbian or male-infertile hetero couples, or single mothers to be, that advantage is even bigger: a genetic intelligence benefit will take decades to pay off at best, while a grant might let you move into a bigger flat right away.
Perhaps this is how the widening gap between capital and labor can be overcome (now that we are no longer having world wars). But I don't think most billionaires will go for it.
In rationalist fiction, there exist at least two versions of that trope: one is The Comet King from Unsong, who only stops making babies when it is prophesied that his children will die cursing his name, the other is Keltham from Planecrash/Project Lawful (whose character might be influenced by Musk), who has a goal to make 100 (or so) babies but is somehow unhappy when his harem conspires to make that a reality for complicated plot reasons.
A grandson carries 25% of the grandfather's genes, on average. Genghis Khan may have been genetically successful, but not to the point where he contributes 25% of the DNA to billions.
The fact is that the number of possible ancestors increases exponentially with the generation.
Wikipedia. If his Y chromosome was carried by 16M people in 2003 CE, then he would have had to spread it to about 1M people ca 1200 CE assuming his ethnic group grew in proportion to the world average. This seems hard to accomplish. If he had 100 sons, and 10k grand-sons, and 1M great-grand-sons, sure. I can totally buy him having 100 sons, but likely not by legitimate wives. If you are the legitimate son or grand-son of Genghis Khan, then you likely have good reproductive opportunities. However, if you were fathered when Genghis Khan raped some peasant woman, your reproductive opportunities are likely below the average of your society, as most societies were somewhat patriarchal at that time and being a bastard would put you near the bottom of the social ladder. Or he had 30 legitimate sons (plausible), and they had 30 legitimate sons in turn (unlikely), and they each fathered 1k sons through wartime rape (utterly implausible).
The HBD position, supported by his father (and possibly one of his brothers - all I know about Kimbal Musk is that he and Elon got into literal fistfights over disagreements at X) being a jerk, is that Musk being a jerk is genetic.
I think it's genetic.
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I don't think HBDers have a set position on that one. A lot of HBDers I've talked to online tend towards a perspective that views intelligence and trivial phenotypic traits as heritable, but stops short at personality. You see this discussed a lot with respect to Jews.
That makes me think HBDers aren't better informed about behavioral genetics than their scientific critics.
(For anyone interested in behavioral genetics, Kathryn Paige-Harden's - or whatever the correct spelling of her name is - "The Genetic Lottery: [Something Something Social Justice]" is good, and it lives up to its subtitle, i.e., she addresses the implications, she just has an opposing point of view to many HBDers. No comment on my own point of view.)
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This is kind of a pedantic point but I think we should be a little uncertain about how 'pro-natalist' Musk's actions are. The birth rate is a statistic measured in children per woman, since women are the limiting factor in births. In terms of birth rate the number of children Musk personally has is irrelevant, the question is how many children would the mothers of his children have had in the counterfactual scenario where they didn't enter into this arrangement with him. This is unanswerable in the specific given that the kind of women who are likely to opt into these arrangements are pretty atypical.
We can imagine a birthrate lowering scenario where many women who would have married peer men and had 2-3 children instead have the single child of a billionaire in return for financial compensation. We can also imagine a birth rate increasing scenario where a billionaire has 3-6 kids with a smaller number of deeply atypical women who likely would not have married and had kids otherwise, or would have had far fewer kids. There's also the possibility Elon having children with high status women reduces their marriageability, which 'frees up' high status men for low(er) status women to marry and have kids with.
That's pretty much the position of professional demographer and pronatalist Lyman Stone. Polygamy reduces fertility, because although a polygamous man has more children than otherwise, his wives (after no. 1) have fewer. Funnily enough that's what happened with Musk. He had six kids with his first wife, but 'only' four with his bottom bitch Shivon Zillis.
Of course, we can also consider quality rather than quantity. If Grimes had a baby with a rockstar, he probably wouldn't change the world. But a baby with a genius, maybe.
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I mean, so long as Musk isn't trying to make everyone live like he is, or trying to add my wife to his harem, why exactly do I care?
Am I happy he goes around impregnating every woman who will let him, by virtue of being the worlds richest man? I mean, it's not the greatest example in the world. That said, definitionally, very few men have "Accumulate so much wealth you can impregnate anyone you want" as a viable reproductive strategy. Also, it's not new either.
All I see is the isolated demand for rigor, and the distraction away from Elon's political activities. An attempt to change the national conversation into a referendum of Musk as a human being, appealing to a morality that his attackers don't even believe in. It's just mouth sounds they make to get people who like him to feel bad, while their own deviant behavior is probably objectively worse in the moral framing they are using to condemn him.
It's not a particularly isolated demand for rigor in the context of Republicans' reaction to Clinton's affairs or the extent to which Republicans have courted the religious right via abortion (arguments about this being more consequential than polygamy are well taken) or gay marriage (not well taken here).
Just to add perspective since I was alive and watching the news during the Clinton drama, there were a variety of objections in increasing importance:
Characterizing the reaction to Clinton as being primarily about the sanctity of marriage is, I think, not remotely reasonable.
Ken Starr was investigating the Lewinsky matter, to establish a pattern of behavior showing that Bill Clinton routinely treated his female staff as a stable of potential sexual conquests.
The fact that most people's impression of the Lewinsky scandal was 'bfd, he cheated on his wife' is a genuinely impressive feat of PR from the Clinton Machine.
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I'm not clear what context you're thinking of. For example, my perspective on the context of the Republican's reaction to the Clinton affairs is that the Democrats largely won the social argument on sexual impropriety even before Trump showed up. Marriage was not that important as a special/sacred thing, and it was so not-important that it was subject to redefinition a decade and so later. The Republicans lost that, and so 20, let alone 30, years after Clinton, the Republican party is not exactly campaigning on marriage issues.
Obergefell was in 2015 and occurred, in my estimation, probably five or so years before the median Republican primary voter had naturally shifted to favoring gay marriage. Resentment against Obergefell being legislation from the bench very much figured into Trump's 2016 win.
I don't think that the argument that Republicans who have previously campaigned or voted based on purported religious principles can now shift to not caring about marriage without abdicating their moral authority, including retroactively, holds water. These principles should be firm. There are probably many more Republican atheists today and the Pence wing of the Republican party is now some combination of homeless and rubes (a lot like the libertarian wing!), so the Republican party abandoning morality in its current campaigning is very logical - but that they have done so is precisely the point of the OP.
There used to be a very understandable alliance between the religious conservatives and Republicans/Trump on abortion, but that battle has now been won at a national level (and abortion is proving a losing issue for Republicans at a state level, so they are dmeemphasizing that outside of appeals to the base). The alliance between religious conservatives and Republicans is now regarding... trans kids playing in high school sports? This is incredibly weak tea to overlook the other implications of a staunchly religious position.
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Why?
This presumes the religious beliefs are the principles that govern political, as opposed to principles of co-existence that allow certain stridency in some topics that have a consensus, and more restrained actions in more controversial issues. Or that actions were properly executing principles in the first place, when additional information- such as increased visibility/exposure/familiarity- would dispel misconceptions and allow principles to be expressed differently. Or that these principles expressed in the past were the primary principles in all contexts, as opposed to always having higher principles but with conditionalities that were not present in the past but are present now. Or that the principles expressed were actual principles as opposed to preferences- the whole principles according to who is in power dynamic, but reversed.
It even presumes that individually-held principles should hold across generations, regardless of time and turnover. Many of the Republicans who made up the religious right as leaders or influencers are no longer Republicans. Some died. Some defected with the ongoing political realignment. Some have disengaged from politics entirely. People voting Republican today are often quite literally not the same people voting Republican a generation ago during the Clinton years and then into the Bush years. The majority of the war fighters in the US, literal and cultural, were born after 9-11.
Why should they hold firm to the principles that different people held in different decades?
'Republicans' and even 'the Republican party' are not some singular collective hive mind, anymore than anyone else. They certainly aren't trans-temporal.
In my view, my reference to "Republicans who have campaigned or previously voted" was indeed me individualizing the standard.
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Surely we can't extrapolate studies on the public to billionaires? Most single mothers had children with men who couldn't give them $10 million a child if they wanted. I'm only surprised more men don't go the Elon route. Most billionaires have conventional family structures.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10934703/amp/Russian-woman-21-babies-Turkish-millionaire-devastated-arrest.html
Also https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43169974
More such cases, but not many - collecting human beings like funko pops is sign of serious psychopathy, and such types were always rare on the ground.
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I think having children in a stable family is much, much better than whatever Elon has going on here, but he was married
firsttwice and I wonder ifthatthose divorces changed his mind about marriage.What the story did inform me was that he and St Clair were in a romantic/sexual relationship; I've seen speculation that he was only a sperm donor for this kid. So, even though I disapprove of this kind of approach to having children, he does seem to be involved in the lives of the children (see how he brought along his four year old son to the White House) and I have less sympathy for St Clair than she might expect: gosh, why ever did she get involved with and sleep with and agree to have a kid with the current wealthiest person in the world, what was the attraction there one wonders? Could it possibly have been the lure of dollar signs, since given his very public track record, it would be difficult to imagine he was offering marriage? Even Jeff Bezos still hasn't married his mistress for whom he blew up his marriage, so I can't think St Clair did honestly believe a ring and wedding bells were on the cards.
EDIT: If that sounds like I think she viewed a kid with Musk as a meal ticket, well.... yes, I'm coming to that conclusion. Particularly the public way she went about revealing she was having his baby. No wonder he's not quite sure the kid might indeed be his, but really Elon, pick a stable woman and get married and have another houseful of kids with her, instead of bouncing around with Canadian pop stars and publicity hounds like this one! Shivon Zilis already is mother to four of his kids and seems, on the face of it, the least crazy candidate for a third marriage. He needs to settle down and stop running around like he's a bachelor in his twenties. A stable home life would be good for him as well and might rein in some of the crazy he's allegedly engaging in.
I mean, maybe he is, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions from that. It's a photo-op. You may as well conclude "Trump does seem to enjoy making burgers in his spare time".
As far as St Clair's motives, while I don't doubt money was involved, many women are sincerely sexually attracted to powerful, successful men, let alone geniuses. And, while no Hollywood star, he's not exactly ugly. I don't have difficulty believing a woman with a shot at him might genuinely have wanted a night with him in its own right, whatever came of it.
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I dont think Musk’s side has very many supporters in this theoretical breakdown.
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Archive Link: https://archive.is/EVkGv
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