Elon Musk

Elon Musk seems to always be in the media limelight for a variety of different reasons. Whether it’s a race to Mars, providing internet to remote parts of the world, starting Neuralink, wrangling with the Tesla stock price, purchasing Twitter, or just fathering babies, it’s been a pretty wild ride.

And on the latter point, how many Elon Musk children are out there? The number is likely more than you would think, considering in social media circles and appearances, he isn’t often talking about family. But he’s father to more than a few.

ELON MUSK HAS FIVE CHILDREN WITH JUSTINE WILSON

Around the time he was ousted from his position as CEO of PayPal, Elon Musk was married to his first wife Justine Wilson. The two had their first child, a son Nevada, in 2000, but he died of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) at just 10 weeks.

Years later, Elon Musk would open up some about this tragedy. He was exchanging messages with the father of a man, James Barrett, whose son had died in an accident while driving a Tesla. In the exchange with the grieving father, Musk said, “My firstborn son died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat…” 

A couple of years later, after Elon Musk and Justine Wilson had reportedly used IVF as a method to have another child, the latter gave birth to twins in 2004. Those were Griffin and Xavier. Then, in 2006 Justine Wilson and Elon Musk had triplets, Damian, Saxon, and Kai.

One of the children, Xavier, has since changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson in a legal filing and has said she no longer wants to be associated with Elon Musk “in any way shape or form.” She took on the last name of her mother for this. Whether this means that how many kids Elon Musk has now is decreased by one is likely just a technicality.

Elon Musk and Justine Wilson were divorced in 2008 though It’s been reported that, at least at the beginning, they shared custody of their five children.

ELON MUSK HAS TWO CHILDREN WITH GRIMES

Around the time he was finalizing his divorce from Justine Wilson, Elon Musk began dating Talulah Riley, and though the couple married, divorced, and married again over the span of a few years, they never had any children together. He also dated Amber Heard, but those two didn’t last all that long. 

Then in 2018, Elon Musk began dating the singer and musician Grimes. Seventeen years Elon Musk’s junior, Grimes and Musk dated for a couple of years before she gave birth to a son in 2020.

Whereas with Elon Musk’s other children, the names were pretty standard (relatively speaking), things went a bit out there when it came to their first child. When they first went to put pen to paper and give the baby a name, they landed on  X Æ A-12. Apparently, the pronunciation of this was X-Ash-A-12.

There was one problem, though. In California, children’s names on birth certificates can only include the 26 letters of the English alphabet. So in this way, Elon Musk and Grimes erred in a couple of different ways. Ultimately, the two landed on the “compromise” X AE A-XII, which we are sure just cleared everything right up.

And though Elon Musk and Grimes would separate in 2021, it came as a surprise in December of that year that Grimes had had another child with Elon Musk. The news of this baby came somewhat by accident.

During an interview with Vanity Fair in which Devin Gordon was sitting down with the singer in her home, he heard a cry coming from upstairs even though it was known that X was out of the house. After some conversation, Grimes opened up that the two had had another child, this one by surrogate, and she was named Y.

Because of the surrogacy, there were no physical signs that Grimes was pregnant and therefore was able to keep that part a secret, at least for a while. At that point, the number of how many kids Elon Musk had was up to seven. Or was it?

TWO CHILDREN WITH SHIVON ZILLIS

Here’s where things get a little sticky when it concerns how many kids Elon Musk has. Business Insider reported that Elon Musk had actually fathered another set of twins in November of 2021. This was about a month before the second child with Grimes was born through surrogacy.

With paperwork filed in court regarding official names, it was found that Elon Musk had twins with Shivon Zillis. Zillis is currently an employee at Neuralink, a company co-founded by Elon Musk that deals with artificial intelligence and the commingling of brain functions and technology.

Zillis was Director of Operations and Special Projects at the company. She had also previously been a Project Director at Tesla.

ELON MUSK HAS NINE CHILDREN IN ALL

In total, Elon Musk has nine children. He has five children with his first wife Justine Wilson, and though one might have disowned him, for these purposes we will still have it count. Then he has two children with Grimes, one of which nearly slipped under the radar had it not been for some deft reporting, though eventually, it would have come out. And now, he has two children with Shivon Zillis.

That’s a pretty big brood even if they are all living in separate households, for now. And if things keep up at this pace, SpaceX might need to up their production to make sure there are enough ships to get all of Elon Musk’s children to Mars.