Elon Musk has the largest fortune on the planet and, according to many, the most unlimited power as well. His journey began in Pretoria, South Africa, as the son of a model and an electromechanical engineer, before continuing at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, where he laid the foundations for his extraordinary career in the world of technology.
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According to a Daily Mail article, the mother of one of his children describes him as a “Gatling sperm gun,” obsessed with the idea of creating a small army of Musks ahead of a “civil war” and willing to impregnate any young right-wing woman who asks him to.
Justine Wilson, his first wife, who had six children with him, says: “I get the impression that we women are almost interchangeable to him. I’ve heard that he calls us ‘breeders.’”
His former partner, Ashley St Clair, with whom he has a son named Romulus, revealed that Musk had told her he wanted to create a legion of children ahead of the civil war. According to her, he received messages on Twitter from women offering themselves to become mothers of his children, describing himself as a “Gatling sperm gun” in his direct messages.
The idea of an imminent Armageddon appears to deeply preoccupy the 55-year-old Tesla and SpaceX tycoon. However, he appears protected from genuine panic because he believes reality is merely a simulation and that machines have treated humans simply as their “pets”—a view he is said to have passed on to Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton.
These are by no means the only shocking claims to emerge in a new documentary, Musk, which runs for almost four hours and premiered yesterday at the Venice Film Festival.
The film highlights allegations that Musk has spread incredible lies about his businesses in order to inflate the value of their shares. Among the untruths attributed to him is the claim that his “self-driving” cars can operate without driver supervision, something that has resulted in nearly 60 deaths and a series of lawsuits in the United States.
Another strange element of which he is accused concerns his plan to colonize Mars, which has been presented as “imminent” for about a decade.
The film then mentions the “classic scam” dating back to 2013, when Musk claimed that owners of Tesla electric cars could replace a fully charged battery in just a few minutes, “faster than you could fill a gas tank.”
As a result of this promise, the company accumulated $11 billion (£8 billion) in carbon credits in California, but it never had the real ability to implement the scheme as it was presented to the public. Author Cory Doctorow describes the scam in the film as a roll of small coins with a $100 bill placed on top.
The documentary also presents new claims that Musk aims to dominate the world through his Starlink satellites, of which around 11,000 are currently in orbit, controlling internet access on a global scale. It is also alleged that he may have gathered data on American citizens during the DOGE period and that he “will use this information to corrupt the next midterm elections.”
DOGE refers to the brief period during which Musk 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—a project that ultimately failed without leaving a trace.
Although DOGE managed to reduce staff and foreign aid, it had no impact on the US national deficit, and Musk resigned after four months, declaring that the government was “beyond repair.”
Musk’s brief period at DOGE is examined closely in the documentary. St Clair, a 28-year-old author and influencer who met Musk on X before giving birth to his child, tells the filmmakers that Musk was extremely confident about Trump’s victory in the 2024 election and left the election-night party at Mar-a-Lago long before the results were announced.
“I knew [the result] hours earlier,” she says, adding that the level of certainty he displayed was something she had never seen before.
The documentary also examines the purchase of Twitter, now called X, in 2022, which immediately lost 80 percent of its value.
Musk was reportedly “furious” about the documentary before it was screened in Venice. In fact, during yesterday’s press conference, St Clair claimed that he offered her $40 million not to take part. Musk was given the opportunity to comment, but refused to be part of the film.
He may claim that he considers the critical analysis laughable, but the film’s main figures—including his first wife, former friends and a former colleague at NASA—all believe that he may be the most dangerous man in the world, as well as the richest.
One of the earliest victims of Musk’s harsh attitude toward human nature was Justine, his first wife, whom he married in 2000. She recalls: “During the dance at our wedding, Elon told me: ‘I am the Alpha in this relationship.’ He constantly reminded me that I had shortcomings and told me that if I were his employee, he would fire me.”
Two years into their eight-year marriage, their first son, Nevada Alexander, died of sudden infant death syndrome when he was just ten weeks old. In a Twitter post, Musk said that he held him in his arms as he died and felt his final heartbeats. However, in the film, Justine claims that she was holding Nevada at that moment, in the hospital.
Within a month of their separation in 2008, he married the little-known British actress Talulah Riley, then 25 while he was 41. They divorced, remarried and then divorced again. They had no children.
He later began a relationship with the 30-year-old Canadian singer Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher.
The relationship began with flirting, and the couple made their public debut at the Met Gala Ball in New York in May 2018. Their son, X, was born in 2020. At the time, Grimes described her boyfriend as “a super interesting person.”
But that year, signs of a transformation in Musk emerged when he declared that “pronouns suck” and that the word “cis,” used for someone whose gender identity corresponds to their biological sex, was a “slur.”
Grimes was horrified and wrote: “I can’t support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.”
But that was exactly what happened. Musk began embracing some truly controversial views. A 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 behaving in ways that were incomprehensible to me.” Technology journalist Kara Swisher adds: “He thinks he is simply a superior being.”
In December 2020, Musk moved to Texas and opened a large Tesla factory in Austin. Around $50 million was spent on television advertising for a right-wing, anti-progressive pressure group called Citizens for Sound Government.
Musk spoke of the “woke mind virus” and blamed it for the decision by his son, Xavier, from his first marriage, to transition and live as a woman named Jenna at the age of 18.
His former wife, Justine, says: “It was painful to watch her suffer. He never tried to fix things; that is not in his nature. If a relationship breaks, then it is broken. She really had to fight to follow her own path. Elon told me one day: ‘Make sure Jenna knows how much I love her.’ The next day, he cut off her health insurance.”
At this point, further complications were emerging on the horizon. Shivon Zilis, an operations director at Musk’s company Neuralink, had twins with him through a surrogate mother in November 2021. This happened one month before his daughter with Grimes was born, also through a surrogate mother. She was named Exa Dark Siderael. Musk posted on Twitter: “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
At the time, Grimes and Musk had separated, but the relationship remained “fluid.” During a period apart, Grimes filed a petition to “establish a parental relationship” with Musk in April 2022, a legal action 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 “create a parent-child relationship” with the three children after learning that the two youngest would not be returning to his home in Texas and that Grimes was keeping them in California. He kept their son X.
Grimes Musk sought primary physical custody of all three children and joint custody. Soon afterward, Grimes publicly requested parental access to X after seeing a photo of Musk with Shivon Zilis and their two children. Apparently, she had learned of their birth only through a report on the US news website Business Insider.
At a hearing in August 2024 to determine custody, Musk claimed that the children had been placed in Austin and were attending school there.
St Clair adds that, after Romulus was born, their romance ended. She tells the documentary: “He was very kind, but from the moment I gave birth to our child, everything disappeared.”
Musk’s intermediary and confidant, Jared Birchall, was sent to negotiate an agreement with St Clair in the form of a “child support agreement,” which contained clauses preventing her from speaking about him. It had a total value of $15 million, plus $100,000 a month. In an audio recording between Birchall and St Clair included in the documentary, she asks: “Do the other mothers sign one of these?”
After being told that they did, she says: “They don’t seem happy.” Birchall replies: “I don’t think a drug-addled musician is capable of finding true happiness. I think Shivon seeks pleasure from time to time. Elon is very kind and generous, but when a mother of his children and a woman he trusted decide to pursue the legal route, that always leads to a worse outcome for women.”
After she refused to sign, her payments fell from $100,000 a month to $40,000 and now to $20,000. “He was intelligent and successful, but he was definitely strange,” she now says of Musk.
“Once we were together and he was falling asleep listening to a podcast about Kublai Khan.” According to legend, the 13th-century Mongol emperor and grandson of Genghis Khan had 47 sons.
Sam Harris, the right-leaning podcaster and a former friend of Musk, says: “We are living in a world where one person’s psychopathology and neuropsychological disorder is translating into enormous consequences in our politics, our economy and our geopolitics.”
“It is completely crazy that we have such a chaotic person, who is entirely unelected, with so much power.”
Alex Gibney, the documentary’s director, agrees with this assessment. “People assume that, because he is very rich, he is not crazy. But the terrifying thing may be that he is crazy and very rich and powerful. That is the warning bell the film is sounding.”
