The Billionaire’s Weapon of Choice in Getting to Legion Level: The Non-Disclosure Agreement
Earlier this month, we wrote of a lowly multi-millionaire who uses non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in connection his longevity business, which involves experimentation with drugs, and his personal life, which involves experimentation with drugs. Also this month, Dana Mattioli reported in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on an equally bizarre web of NDAs that Elon Musk uses to keep the mothers of his children (who may or may not be his sexual partners) from revealing that they are the mother of his children or perhaps that his children are his children. The rather bizarre result is that we do not know how many children the world’s richest man has. All we know is that his goal is to achieve “legion levels” before the apocalypse.
According to the WSJ, Mr. Musk offered conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair $15 million plus $100,000/month until her baby turned 21 in exchange for her silence about her child with Musk, whom the couple named Romulus. Perhaps in an effort to re-assure Ms. St. Clair, Mr. Musk’s “fixer” informed Ms. St. Clare that this was the standard deal. Of course, the original Romulus was a twin, so when you give a child that name, you must be anticipating at least one more on the way, and that it will eventually be raised by wolves. According to the WSJ, Mr. Musk informed Ms. St. Clair that they would need to use surrogates in order to reproduce at the desired rate.
The article does not spell out the logic, but apparently Mr. Musk believes that declining population puts the world under threat. He is doing his part to reverse that decline, but he also thinks that the human race needs to become “multiplanetary” in order to survive.
However, once a woman has helped Musk conceive his children, he seeks to control them through NDAs, and he punishes them financially if they get out of line. So the musician Grimes reportedly complained on X, Mr. Musk’s social media platform, about Mr. Musk’s use of X, their son, as a prop during a press conference in the Oval Office. That displeased Mr. Musk, and so he stopped communicating with Grimes. She then took to X, the website, to seek Mr. Musk’s help when one of their children (X? Not X?) was having a medical crisis. Bit of a Streisand effect there, I’d say.
The WSJ reporting also suggests that Mr. Musk initiates relationships with his followers on Twitter/X, in the interests of finding new women with whom he can reproduce, perhaps through sperm donation. The transactions can be lucrative. Twitter/X enables people to quickly monetize attention, and one cryptocurrency influencer boasted of earning $21,000 in two weeks because Mr. Musk drew attention to her feed. However, as Stuart A. Thompson reported this with in The New York Times, what Mr. Musk giveth, he can also take away. Influencers who criticize Mr. Musk can quickly lose followers if he decides to turn off the attention spigot.
According to Mr. Musk’s fixer, NDAs are necessary to protect Mr. Musk’s personal information. After all, said the fixer, according to the WSJ, “He is the biggest lightning rod on the planet.” Did I mention the Streisand effect? The fixer adds, “[W]e have dealt with some very unstable, mentally unstable, people that all of a sudden misremember things.” Perhaps Mr. Musk should spend more time vetting the people with whom he chooses the reproduce. Clearly, intelligence is something he values, but if that were the only value, why not populate the earth with robots rather than people?
Ms. St. Clair has not been a compliant partner. She insisted on a vaginal birth, which Mr. Musk believes limits the brain-size of the fetus. She also wanted the boy circumcised, as she is Jewish. She wanted a paternity test and some guarantees in case of Mr. Musk’s demise before the child turned 21. She retained an attorney. All of these are forbidden, and Mr. Musk has responded by withdrawing the $15 million offer and reducing her monthly stipend, first to $40,000 and then to $20,000. Ms. St. Clair’s legal fees have exceeded $240,000. One of her attorneys says that Mr. Musk is “weaponizing” money, as if that is something surprising rather than the name of the game.