SOMEWHERE INSIDE THE NIGHTMARE I CAN’T SEEM TO WAKE FROM (The Daily Whatever Wire) — The richest man who has ever lived told the mother of one of his children that he needed “a legion of children before the civil war.” What the actual f*%k?
Not before the election. Before the civil war. That is the sentence Ashley St. Clair says arrived in a text message, and it is now in a 4-hour documentary that premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and if it does not rearrange your entire fucking afternoon into a horror show of vomiting, then you have not been paying attention to what this man says when he thinks it won’t be repeated.
The Retail Version and the Wholesale Version
Here is what he says in public, posted to a couple hundred million people on the website he owns: “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” First of all, um, no on both counts, Smeagol.
That is the shareholder version, dressed up as a demographic worry, and it has been repeated by so many credulous podcast hosts nodding along like bobbleheads on a dashboard that it now passes for a position instead of a symptom of some delusional mental condition.
The private version, according to St. Clair, is that he needs a legion of children before the civil war. And, again, just ew. Like that guy’s baby gravy is the stuff we want breeding an army? *SHUDDER*
Those are not the same fucking belief. One of them is a guy worried about the birth rate. The other one is a guy who expects the country to come apart into open violence and wants numbers on his side when it does. That is not pronatalism. That is a man raising a unit, and every tech reporter who has spent 4 years calling it “eccentric” should be ashamed of themselves.
Also, at least one of his adult children has publicly renounced him, so his seed doesn’t seem to run so true, in the language of Westeros.
Alex Gibney Is Not Some Guy With a Camera
The film is called Musk. It runs 4 hours, it was shot over 3 years, and it was directed by Alex Gibney, who made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Going Clear and won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side. This is not some YouTube bullshit assembled by a hater in a basement. This is the filmmaker who takes apart powerful American institutions for a living, and he has spent 20 years demonstrating that he does not miss.
Musk called it a “hit piece” in March 2023, which is genuinely impressive, because in March 2023 the goddamn film did not exist yet. Gibney’s reply was “how would you know?” He also says the hardest part of the job was that “there was a tremendous sense of fear of talking,” which tells you what it costs to be near this man and say anything true out loud ever again.
About That Word
He picked “legion.” Of every available word for a large number of children, that is the one he reached for.
In Mark 5, Jesus asks the possessed man his name, and the thing inside him answers, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” Anyone raised anywhere near a church knows that line, and anyone who saw The Exorcist too young knows it better. A legion is not a goddamn family. A legion is a Roman military formation of about 5,000 men, and the word means the same thing today that it meant then: a force you deploy.
He reads constantly and picks his words with enormous care when he wants to. This was no accident of vocabulary.
Now Do the Arithmetic
Musk has 14 confirmed children with 4 women.
Six with his first wife, Justine Wilson, one of whom died in infancy. Three with Grimes. One with Ashley St. Clair. And 4 with Shivon Zilis, a director at Neuralink — an executive at one of his own companies — conceived at least partly through IVF and, per Reuters, without a romantic relationship at all.
That last part is the part that should make your skin crawl, and it is worth being exact about why. This is not a story about a womanizer. A womanizer is at least interested in the women. This is procurement. This is a spreadsheet with a birth plan attached, and it is one of the creepiest fucking things a human being has ever organized on purpose. This is a man who has apparently decided that the correct number of offspring is “more,” has sorted the logistics accordingly, and has staffed part of the operation from inside his own org chart, which is a sentence about workplace power that no HR department on this planet would survive writing down without a fire extinguisher and a lawyer.
The women are people, not brood mares, and nobody should talk about them otherwise. The children are children, and not one of them signed up to be a headcount in somebody’s imagined civil war. The man who organized it this way is the one on the hook.
Forty Million Dollars to Shut Up
St. Clair says she was offered $40 million up front plus $100,000 a month to sign an NDA. She said no, and the offer was pulled.
$40 million is what silence was worth to him. That is a man who has never once in his adult life met a person he could not buy, pricing a human being’s conscience like he was bidding on a fucking domain name. She turned it down and went on camera instead, and whatever you think of her politics, that is a more expensive act of conscience than most of us will ever be asked to make.
The Emergency Is Imaginary
The United Nations projects the world population hits 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion by 2050, and roughly 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s, still climbing.
There is no population collapse. There is a birth-rate decline in wealthy countries, a real and boring problem with real and boring solutions like child care, housing, and paid leave, none of which this cheap son of a bitch has ever shown the slightest interest in funding. The crisis is invented. The panic is the product.
And the panic always, always arrives with a bill attached for everybody who is not producing children on schedule.
The Part That Should Actually Scare You
He owns the platform. St. Clair’s own words: he is “stoking flames that don’t exist in the real world,” causing “deliberate division that may be catastrophic if it’s not regulated or tamed.”
So the man breeding a legion in advance of a civil war also happens to own the largest machine on earth for convincing Americans that a civil war is coming. That is not a coincidence, and we should stop pretending it might be one. He is an exceptionally rich manchild, who is living out all of his Mad Max-porn-adjacent control fantasies in the world we once thought contained at least a little bit of freedom.
He told the world the danger was that there would not be enough people. He told her the danger was the other people.
The danger, of course, is him, and his gross desire to populate his fever-dreamed post-civil-war landscape with millions of mini-mes.
Thanks for reading!
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Oh good grief. I know people who made this guy a hero. Just gross.
For what it's worth, daughter Vivian Wilson seems lovely. She's had minimal contact with her father.