Captain Apartheid

[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

Mr."Free Speech"...

https://newrepublic.com/post/177936/twi ... -elon-musk

[Simon of the Playa]

It's worth noting, though, that Tesla does mention the possibility of corrosion in the owner's manual, in a passage that makes maintenance for the brutalist pickup sound exceedingly fussy.
"To prevent damage to the exterior, immediately remove corrosive substances (such as grease, oil, bird droppings, tree resin, dead insects, tar spots, road salt, industrial fallout, etc.)," the company's documentation reads. "Do not wait until Cybertruck is due for a complete wash."
"The Cybertruck’s exterior is susceptible to corrosion, as acknowledged in the manual," one Cybertruck Owners Club forum member, who posted screenshots of the documentation, wrote. "Once the oxide barrier is compromised, corrosion initiates."

https://futurism.com/cybertruck-owners-already-rusting

[some seeing eye]

Terrorists Are Paying for Check Marks on X, Report Says

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/tech ... eport.html

[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

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[some seeing eye]

Beyond bad parenting and bad relationships...

I slept in my car and showered in the factory to work 12-hour shifts at Tesla. I still got laid off after 5 years.
As told to Beatrice Nolan May 19, 2024, 4:04 AM PDT

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-w ... off-2024-5

[some seeing eye]

Elon Musk leaks results from Tesla’s shareholder vote as messy week begins

https://electrek.co/2024/06/10/elon-mus ... ek-begins/

"Much has changed since 2018, the year Tesla dreamed up an unorthodox pay package that, in theory, tied Mr. Musk’s pay to the company’s performance. Problem is, the performance was not for making high-quality cars or making affordable cars or making cars at scale. The performance was for pushing Tesla’s stock price up."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/opin ... =url-share

[Simon of the Playa]

Sherwood News used satellite imagery to compare parking lots of unsold Tesla stockpiles in October 2023 versus five months later in March 2024. The images show much fuller parking lots in March versus October. This confirms what Tesla’s Q1 earnings in April said; the company is producing significantly more cars than it’s selling. Tesla’s deliveries declined 8.5% from last year, and the company produced nearly 47,000 more cars than it sold. This was the first decline in sales since 2020.

https://gizmodo.com/tesla-elon-musk-evs ... 1851529710

[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

starlinked or starfucked?


https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5eAzz-R5ye/


https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-mu ... udy-2024-6


The study, published last week in the peer-reviewed Geophysical Research Letters journal, found that the presence of the oxides increased roughly eightfold between 2016 and 2022 — and could surge far more with current satellite launch plans.

SpaceX has plans to launch another 42,000 Starlink satellites, according to Space.com.

[some seeing eye]

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/21/2418 ... -neuralink

"According to a report from Bloomberg. Neuralink director Shivon Zilis reportedly had the child with Musk earlier this year."

"Musk already has twins with Zilis, which Business Insider discovered in 2022 after digging up a court document. He has three children with the musician Grimes and six children from previous relationships, making for a total of 12 that we know of."

Get pregnant with Elon dome?

[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

"He sounded like a disoriented, racist Daffy Duck."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ ... 774628007/

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[some seeing eye]

Twitter releases Grok-2 AI image generator with no guardrails

https://gizmodo.com/taylor-swift-pullin ... 2000487130

(I think they mean "not to advertise.")

News feed on the topic from multiple sources

https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqNgg ... id=US%3Aen

Helter Skelter

[some seeing eye]

Author Walter Isaacson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Isaacson is a noted biographer. He published a biography in 2023.

[Simon of the Playa]

karma police, arrest this man.


https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74882jq39vo

[Simon of the Playa]

a piece of shit doing shitty things

[Simon of the Playa]

“I will be there to support!” Musk replied to a post by Trump on the social media platform X.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/el ... rcna173998

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[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

"Right now, we're kind of in a race to the bottom and that race is being led by Elon Musk,"

https://abcnews.go.com/US/ahead-electio ... =114603562

[Simon of the Playa]

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[Simon of the Playa]

he's giving 75 million dollars to donald trump.


let.
that.
sink.
in.


https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBL-546PybI/

[Simon of the Playa]

It is a federal crime to pay people with the intention of inducing or rewarding them to cast a vote, or to get registered, an offense punishable by prison time. The prohibition covers not only monetary expenditures, but also anything of monetary value like liquor or lottery chances, a Justice Department election-crimes manual says.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-m ... 024-10-20/

[some seeing eye]

WaPo https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... on-status/

Elon Musk, enemy of ‘open borders,’ launched his career working illegally
Investors in Musk’s first company worried about “our founder being deported” and gave him a deadline for obtaining a work visa

By Maria Sacchetti, Faiz Siddiqui and Nick Miroff
October 26, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
Musk in recent months has amplified the Republican presidential candidate’s claims that “open borders” and undocumented immigrants are destroying America, broadcasting those views to more than 200 million followers on the site formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought in 2022 and later renamed X.

What Musk has not publicly disclosed is that he did not have the legal right to work while building the company that became Zip2, which sold for about $300 million in 1999. It was Musk’s steppingstone to Tesla and the other ventures that have made him the world’s wealthiest person — and arguably America’s most successful immigrant.

Musk and his brother, Kimbal, have often described their immigrant journey in romantic terms, as a time of personal austerity, undeterred ambition and a willingness to flout conventions. Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his start-up.

Leaving school left Musk without a legal basis to remain in the United States, according to legal experts.

Foreign students cannot drop out of school to build a company, even if they are not immediately getting paid, said Leon Fresco, a former Justice Department immigration litigator.

“If you do anything that helps to facilitate revenue creation, such as design code or try to make sales in furtherance of revenue creation, then you’re in trouble,” Fresco said.

Musk’s freewheeling business approach soon conflicted with Zip2’s hopes of becoming a public company or entering a high-profile merger, which would have subjected it to scrutiny by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to former associates.


When the venture capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures poured $3 million into Musk’s company in 1996, the funding agreement — a copy of which was obtained by The Post — stated that the Musk brothers and an associate had 45 days to obtain legal work status. Otherwise, the firm could reclaim its investment.

“Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the U.S.,” said Derek Proudian, a Zip2 board member at the time who later became chief executive. Investors agreed, Proudian said: “We don’t want our founder being deported.”


Another large shareholder at the time, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said a minor problem drew additional attention to the Musk brothers’ unresolved immigration issues. Musk told co-workers he was in the country on a student visa, according to six former associates and Zip2 shareholders.


“We want to take care of this long before there’s anything that could screw up” the company’s path to an initial public offering, Proudian recalled.

In Elon Musk’s public retelling of his immigration story, he has never acknowledged having worked without proper legal status. In 2013, he joked about being in a “gray area” early in his career. And in 2020, Musk said he had a “student-work visa” after deferring his studies at Stanford.

“I was legally there, but I was meant to be doing student work,” he said in a 2020 podcast. “I was allowed to do work sort of supporting whatever.”

Musk, his attorney Alex Spiro and the manager of Musk’s family office did not respond to emailed requests for comment. U.S. immigration records generally are not open to the public, making it difficult to independently confirm a person’s legal status.


In 2005, Musk acknowledged in a late-night email that he did not have authorization to be in the United States when he founded Zip2. The email, from Musk to Tesla co-founders Martin Eberhard and JB Straubel, was submitted as evidence in a long-since-closed California defamation lawsuit and said he applied to Stanford so he could remain in the United States legally.

“Actually, I didn’t really care much for the degree, but I had no money for a lab and no legal right to stay in the country, so that seemed like a good way to solve both issues,” Musk wrote. “Then the internet came along, which seemed like a much surer bet.”

Musk never enrolled at Stanford. In a May 2009 deposition, he said he called the department chair two days after the start of the semester to say he wasn’t going to attend. In the same deposition, he said he began working at Zip2 — originally called Global Link Information Network — in August or September 1995.


Upon not enrolling, Musk would have had to leave the country, according to legal experts and immigration laws at the time. He would not have been allowed to work.

While overstaying a student visa is somewhat common and officials have at times turned a blind eye to it, it remains illegal.

The revelation that Musk lacked the legal right to work in the United States stands at odds with his recent focus on undocumented immigrants and U.S. border security, among the issues that have led him to spend more than $100 million helping Trump return to the White House. If Trump wins on Nov. 5, both men have said Musk could have a high-profile role in his administration.

On X, Musk has become an avid booster of anti-immigrant rhetoric, falsely accusing Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats of “importing voters.” Undocumented immigrants are legally barred from voting in state and federal elections. In February, he wrote that “illegals in America can get … insurance, driver’s licenses.”


Musk would have been required to have both to drive a vehicle, which associates attested he frequently did during the time he lacked a legal work permit.


U.S. immigration regulations for foreign students were more lax in the 1990s, before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks prompted an overhaul, according to immigration law experts. Musk, who obtained Canadian citizenship through his mother, would not have needed a visa from the State Department to study at a U.S. university. He could simply show U.S. university enrollment documents to U.S. border officers and enter the United States with student status, legal experts said.

Foreign students enrolled in U.S. degree programs may be authorized to work part time and for limited periods to complete their degree requirements. Adam Cohen, author of “The Academic Immigration Handbook” and an attorney who specializes in employment visas, said Musk could obtain work authorization as a student, but that would have required him to be engaged in a full course of study at Stanford.


Otherwise, “that would have been a violation,” Cohen said. If he didn’t go to school, “he wasn’t maintaining his status.”

Ira Kurzban, an immigration law expert and the author of a legal sourcebook used widely by attorneys and judges, agreed.

Kurzban said the brothers’ subsequent applications for work visas and to become U.S. permanent residents and naturalized citizens would have asked whether they worked in the United States without authorization. “If you tell them you worked illegally in the U.S., it’s highly unlikely you’d get approved,” Kurzban said.

Kimbal Musk has repeatedly acknowledged working in the United States without legal status — describing his experience as evidence of a dysfunctional U.S. system that blocks talented foreigners. In a 2013 onstage interview alongside his brother, he said they were sleeping in the office and showering at the YMCA when they joined the dot-com gold rush.


Then investors began offering them huge sums of money and buying them cars, he said, only to find out that the brothers had no legal permission to work in the United States.

“In fact, when they did fund us, they realized that we were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal said in the 2013 interview.

“Well,” Elon said.

“Yes, we were,” Kimbal said.

“I’d say it was a gray area,” Elon replied, to audience laughter.

“We were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal said flatly.

Kimbal has also said he misled U.S. federal agents to reenter the United States for a crucial investor meeting after visiting his mother in Canada. When U.S. officers searching his luggage at the airport discovered his business cards and California address, they realized he was traveling for work — without authorization.

After they turned him away, he said, he enlisted a friend to drive him over the border, telling officers they were headed to see David Letterman’s show. Officers waved them through, and Kimbal made it to the meeting.

“That’s fraud on entry,” said Kurzban, the immigration expert. “That would make him inadmissible and permanently barred from the United States,” he said, unless the penalties were waived.

Kimbal Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Last month, Elon Musk called himself “extremely pro immigrant, being one myself. However, just as when hiring for a company, we should confirm that anyone allowed into the country is talented, hardworking and ethical.”

But Musk appeared to have benefited from his backers’ initial inattention to his own status, according to former business associates.

“Perhaps naively we never examined whether he was a legal citizen,” said one key investor in Musk’s first company, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue. “He had a burning desire to be successful. We were investing in him. … We felt that he was really driven.”

Musk’s fortune has its roots in this period, which fueled his rise in Silicon Valley and provided seed funding for later ventures, including X.com, a predecessor to PayPal. (Musk later revived the name when he bought Twitter.) Musk was chief executive of PayPal until September 2000, when board members ousted him. Two years later, eBay acquired PayPal, earning Musk roughly $176 million, which he used to make later bets on Tesla and SpaceX.

PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, left, and founder Elon Musk at its corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, California, in 2000.

A 2023 authorized biography by Walter Isaacson asserted that the Musks had needed visas and investors at Mohr Davidow Ventures lined them up with an attorney to secure them, but it included few further details. Biographer Ashlee Vance also reported that the investment firm got the brothers visas. Neither reported that Musk had been working without authorization.

Mohr Davidow Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.

Documents obtained by The Post show that Zip2’s executives met with immigration attorney Jocelyne Lew on Feb. 21, 1996, to discuss potential visa pathways for the Musk brothers and another Canadian co-founder. Lew advised the men to downplay their leadership roles with the company and scrub their résumés of U.S. addresses that might suggest they were already living and working in the United States, the documents show.

Lew encouraged Musk to seek another student visa from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had studied as an undergraduate, the documents show. She also directed him to obtain passport-size photos that would allow him to apply to the U.S. “visa lottery,” according to the files.

Lew did not respond to requests for comment.

Proudian, the former Zip2 board member and investor, said the board worried that the founders’ lack of legal immigration status would have to be disclosed in an SEC filing if the company were to go public. He recalled the Musks’ work authorizations coming through around 1997.

A person who joined Zip2’s human resources department in 1997 remembers processing work visas for the Musks and other family members under a category available to Canadians under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Legal experts said Elon Musk also might have violated the law by persuading his brother to come run the company. A 1986 federal law made it a crime to knowingly hire someone who does not have work authorization. Musk said in 2003 and 2009 that he “convinced” Kimbal to come from Canada to work for his company.

Records filed with the California secretary of state show Elon Musk was the registered agent for Global Link Information Network when it incorporated in November 1995. On Feb. 26, 1996, the company listed Kimbal as president and CEO and Elon as secretary.

“I tried to get a visa, but there’s just no visa you can get to do a start-up,” Kimbal said in a 2021 interview. “I was definitely illegal.”

By Maria Sacchetti
Maria Sacchetti covers immigration for the Washington Post, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the court system. She previously reported for the Boston Globe, where her work led to the release of several immigrants from jail. She lived for several years in Latin America and is fluent in Spanish.follow on X @mariasacchetti

By Faiz Siddiqui
Faiz Siddiqui is a technology reporter with The Washington Post's Business Desk covering companies such as Tesla and Twitter. His area of coverage has also included ride-hailing and the race to build autonomous cars. Prior to that, he covered the D.C. Metro and local transportation scene.follow on X @faizsays

By Nick Miroff
Nick Miroff covers the Department of Homeland Security for The Washington Post, with a focus on immigration enforcement and the southern border. He was a Post foreign correspondent in Latin America from 2010 to 2017, and has been a staff writer since 2006.follow on X @NickMiroff

[some seeing eye]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/busi ... pound.html

Wild person & Texas

Elon Musk Wants Big Families. He Bought a Secret Compound for His.
As the billionaire warns of population collapse and the moral obligation to have children, he’s navigating his own complicated family.

For this article, the reporters visited Austin, Texas, and interviewed more than two dozen people.

Oct. 29, 2024
On a quiet, leafy street of multimillion-dollar properties, one stands out: a 14,400-square-foot mansion that looks like a villa plucked from the hills of Tuscany and transplanted to Austin, Texas.

This is where Elon Musk, 53, the world’s richest man and perhaps the most important campaign backer of former President Donald J. Trump, has been trying to establish the cornerstone of an unusual family compound, according to four people familiar with his plans.

Mr. Musk has told people close to him in recent months that he envisions his children (of which there are at least 11) and two of their three mothers occupying adjoining properties. That way, his younger children could be a part of one another’s lives, and Mr. Musk could schedule time among them.

Directly behind the villa is a six-bedroom mansion that Mr. Musk helped purchase, according to two of the people and public records. The total cost of both properties was about $35 million. When in Austin, he often stays at a third mansion about a 10-minute walk away, the people said.

Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children and one secretive, multibillionaire father who obsesses about declining birthrates when he isn’t overseeing one of his six companies: It is an unconventional family situation, and one that Mr. Musk seems to want to make even bigger.

A proponent of in vitro fertilization, Mr. Musk believes strongly in increasing the world’s population. He has even offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances, including the former independent vice-presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, according to two people familiar with his offer. Ms. Shanahan turned him down.

Mr. Musk has tried to keep his own growing family a secret. The compound, and his efforts to fill it with his children, which have not been previously reported, isn’t just a personal matter for him; it is rooted in the existential anxieties that underpin his business empire.

He was an early investor in his electric car company, Tesla, out of concerns about reliance on fossil fuels. He founded his rocket company, SpaceX, now a significant government contractor, so that he could colonize Mars for humans in case Earth becomes uninhabitable.

Over the last two years, he has become increasingly fixated on what he sees as another threat: declining birthrates. He believes a global population collapse is coming that will wipe out humanity. His apocalyptic vision is unlikely, according to demographers, but on X, the social media company he owns, he has been encouraging followers to have as many children as possible.

“It should be considered a national emergency to have kids,” Mr. Musk posted in June.

For the moment, Mr. Musk is temporarily encamped in Pennsylvania, immersed in the presidential campaign and spending tens of millions of dollars to finance Mr. Trump’s get-out-the-vote operations. A Trump victory could make Mr. Musk perhaps the most powerful private citizen in the country, and Mr. Trump has already said he would appoint the billionaire to oversee an “efficiency commission” to scrutinize the workings of the entire federal government.

But it is in Texas where Mr. Musk has moved much of his business operations and is trying to establish his family compound. The compound is off to a bumpy start.

One of the mothers, Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, Mr. Musk’s brain technology start-up, has moved into one of the homes with her children. But Claire Boucher, the musician better known as Grimes, who is the mother to three of his children, is in a protracted legal fight with Mr. Musk and has so far steered clear.

The third mother is Mr. Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, with whom he has five living children, all in their late teens or older. There is room in the Austin compound if they were to visit, though he is estranged from at least one of those children.

In choosing Senator JD Vance as his running mate, Mr. Trump brought declining birthrates to the forefront of this year’s presidential election. Mr. Vance, who has raised alarms about the issue, made headlines for scolding “childless cat ladies.” Mr. Musk’s push for procreation also aligns globally with world leaders like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and has made him something of a hero among pronatalists, who believe people should have as many children as possible.

In a biography published in 2015, Mr. Musk worried that educated people weren’t having enough children. “I’m not saying like only smart people should have kids. I’m just saying that smart people should have kids as well,” he said. “I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s probably not good.’”

His views seem to echo those of his father, Errol Musk. The elder Mr. Musk, who is 78 and has seven children with three women, praised his son’s “good genes” and desire to have many children.

“You breed horses,” Errol Musk said in an interview in September. “People are the same. If you have a good father and a good mother, you’ll have exceptional children. If you have no children, I feel very sorry for you.”

In a book published in 2023, Elon Musk told his biographer that he and his father, who lives in South Africa, are sometimes estranged, partly because Errol Musk had two children with his own former stepdaughter. But the elder Mr. Musk said that he and his son were in frequent contact and that he had recently traveled to Texas to visit him and his children.

“I haven’t met one or two of them because they’re still secret,” the elder Mr. Musk said.

Mr. Musk, his attorney and the head of his family office did not return requests for comment. Representatives for Ms. Boucher did not return requests for comment. Ms. Zilis and Ms. Shanahan also did not return requests for comment.

“Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about Nevada’s death,” Justine Musk wrote in a 2010 essay. “I didn’t understand this, just as he didn’t understand why I grieved openly.” Ms. Musk wrote that she coped by “making my first visit to an I.V.F. clinic less than two months later.”

The couple had five children using I.V.F. before they divorced in 2008: twins, Griffin and Vivian, who are now 20, followed by triplets, Saxon, Damian and Kai, now in their late teens. Mr. Musk has said that I.V.F. is a more efficient way of having children because it allows parents to control parts of the process, according to a person who understands his thinking.

By 2016, as the head of Tesla and SpaceX, Mr. Musk had amassed a net worth of more than $11 billion, according to Forbes. That year, he warned for the first time on Twitter, the social network now known as X, that the world could be headed for population collapse.

“Consequences of population implosion greatly underestimated,” he wrote in response to an article about falling birthrates. In private, he had warned of the issue to his friends and family for years.

He twice married and divorced the actress Talulah Riley, whose desire to focus on her career instead of having children was a factor in their breakup, according to three people familiar with her thinking. Representatives for Ms. Riley didn’t return requests for comment.

In 2020, Mr. Musk and Ms. Boucher, whom he started dating two years earlier, had their first child, a son they named X Æ A-Xii, or X for short.

He started becoming even more vocal about the declining population. “Population collapse is 2nd biggest danger to civilization after AI,” he tweeted in July 2020, a couple of months after X’s birth.

Over the next few years, Mr. Musk had more children with Ms. Boucher as well as with Ms. Zilis. The arrangement created tensions that sometimes flared on social media.

In 2021, without Ms. Boucher’s knowledge, Mr. Musk donated sperm to Ms. Zilis, who became pregnant with twins through I.V.F., according to three people familiar with the couple. That same year, the billionaire and Ms. Boucher were expecting a second child also conceived via I.V.F. but carried by a surrogate.

The two women, who had been friends and ran in similar social circles, had unknowingly been at the same Austin hospital around the same time, according to an authorized biography of Mr. Musk by Walter Isaacson. Ms. Zilis had twins in late 2021, weeks before Ms. Boucher’s child, a girl, was born. Ms. Boucher found out that Mr. Musk had fathered Ms. Zilis’s children a month after they were born, according to two people close to the situation.

Further complicating matters, Mr. Musk took a name that he and Ms. Boucher had chosen for their daughter — Valkyrie — and gave it to one of Ms. Zilis’s twins, according to two people familiar with the naming. Ms. Boucher was so offended that she wrote a song about the episode, which she posted to Twitter.

“A girl cursed with my daughter’s name,” Ms. Boucher wrote in a now-deleted tweet, “will now carry her mother’s shame.” (In the end, Ms. Zilis changed her daughter’s name, while Ms. Boucher chose a different name for her child.)

By then, Ms. Boucher was living in Austin and co-parenting her children with Mr. Musk. Ms. Zilis was also living in the city, according to three people close to her.

Both women, at times, have treated Mr. Musk as their romantic partner, and backed his beliefs about a population crisis and having children to save humanity.

“I’ve spent most of my adult life working on what I figured would most contribute to a better future within the aperture of my skill set, but having kids makes it non-negotiably and viscerally obligatory to fight for that goal,” Ms. Zilis posted on X in March.

Mr. Musk has aligned himself with world leaders who share his concerns about declining birthrates in developed countries, like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times
Over the last three years, Mr. Musk has ratcheted up his alarm over the declining birthrate across the United States and elsewhere. In 2021, his foundation gave $10 million to the University of Texas to study fertility and population trends. He has posted at least 67 times on the subject since 2021, 33 of them in the last year.

“I’m doing my best to encourage more people to become parents and ideally have three or more kids, so humanity can grow,” he posted in February.

Mr. Musk has been celebrated by supporters of the growing pronatalist movement. While pronatalists on the Christian right believe children should be conceived through traditional marriages between a man and a woman, Silicon Valley adherents accept a wide array of family structures as well as reproductive technology like I.V.F.

Simone and Malcolm Collins, who founded the Pronatalist Foundation in 2021, have come to the movement from worry about demographic collapse and applaud what Ms. Collins called Silicon Valley’s “thinking about the future in a clearer way.” A married couple with four children, they said they were working for the betterment of humankind.

“Our worldview value is based around the goal of an eventual pluralistic intergalactic human civilization,” Mr. Collins said.

Few demographers believe the planet will face a catastrophic demographic event in the next few decades. The United Nations said in July that the global population, which is now eight billion, is expected to grow by two billion over the next 60 years, and then gradually fall by about 700 million people.

Nonetheless, a number of developed countries like Japan, Italy and Germany have been struggling to increase population as they face the economic consequences of a declining birthrate, like a shrinking work force and the costs of caring for the elderly.

“There is an awful morality to those who deliberately have no kids: they are effectively demanding that other people’s kids take care of them in their old age,” Mr. Musk posted on X in 2023, in response to a video of dual-income couples bragging about having no children.

These trends have alarmed other global tech figures. The Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Collinses’ foundation and is himself a father of five. The founder of the messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, claimed in July that he had fathered more than 100 biological children through sperm donation. Mr. Durov, who is under arrest in France over charges of allowing criminal activity on Telegram, has said he plans to “open source” his DNA.

Mr. Musk, too, has offered to share his DNA. At a dinner party held at the home of a well-known Silicon Valley executive last year, Mr. Musk offered to provide his sperm to a married couple he had met socially only a handful of times, according to two people who were present for the interaction.

The couple had mentioned at the dinner that they were having trouble conceiving a child. Mr. Musk told them he was happy to assist, and boasted about his many children, according to the people present.

In the winter of 2022, Mr. Musk made a similar suggestion to Ms. Shanahan around the time that Ms. Shanahan told people she had sex with Mr. Musk. (Ms. Shanahan has denied that she had an affair with Mr. Musk.)

The former running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ms. Shanahan has a daughter with her former husband, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin. She declined Mr. Musk’s offer.

Mr. Musk has moved much of his business operations to Texas and is now trying to establish his family compound in Austin. Credit...Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times
Initially, Mr. Musk had hoped to build a compound for his families on hundreds of acres that he and his companies owned outside Austin, near Tesla’s headquarters, according to four people familiar with the plans. But that idea appeared to fall apart after the Justice Department began investigating whether Tesla’s resources had been used on a secret effort to build a glass house for Mr. Musk’s personal use, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In August 2023, Mr. Musk said he was “not building a house of any kind,” in a post on X.

By that time, Mr. Musk had begun touring Austin for homes that could fit his growing families but was having trouble with at least one of the mothers of his children.

He had been living with Ms. Boucher in a 6,900-square-foot house on a small cul-de-sac, according to three people familiar with the couple, when the pair welcomed a third child, a son born via surrogate.

Mr. Musk wanted to buy property next to the one he lived in with Ms. Boucher so that he could create a private compound and incorporate more of his children.

But Ms. Boucher, who once described her relationship with Mr. Musk as “very fluid,” moved out in the summer of 2023. She eventually left Austin amid a custody battle with Mr. Musk, according to three people familiar with her move.

Still Mr. Musk continued his home purchase spree. He offered some homeowners 20 to 70 percent above the value of their houses, according to those homeowners. Some were required to sign nondisclosure agreements just to see the offer, according to three people familiar with the agreements.

It’s unclear which members of Mr. Musk’s families will live in those homes. Some of his oldest children aren’t close to their father, including his daughter Vivian, who is transgender. In an interview, Mr. Musk said Vivian was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” Vivian, for her part, accused Mr. Musk of pretending to care about his children. “You are not a family man,” she wrote on Threads in August. She declined to comment.

Only Ms. Zilis is currently living in Austin, where she is sometimes seen at events around the city, three people familiar with her said. In June, Mr. Musk confirmed to The New York Post that he had a third child with Ms. Zilis after Bloomberg reported on the child’s existence.

When Mr. Musk is in town, neighbors, including some who haven’t met him, say they can tell when someone is home because of the extra security stationed out front. Sometimes, they see a pet groomer pick up a small dog.

The neighbors say they don’t know why Mr. Musk chose the neighborhood when he clearly values privacy. The area is densely populated and the community is not gated.

“I just keep thinking with that much money, he’s probably got lots of whims and he’ll do something else soon,” said Jim Lewis, a retired rancher who lives near the house where Mr. Musk stays.

In September, the pop star Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president, signing her Instagram post “Childless Cat Lady.” Mr. Musk posted on X, “Fine Taylor…you win…I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”

People close to Mr. Musk believe he was only half joking.

Paul Mozur contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

Kirsten Grind is an investigative business reporter writing stories about companies, chief executives and billionaires across Silicon Valley and the technology industry. More about Kirsten Grind

Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry. More about Ryan Mac

Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel

[Simon of the Playa]

“I’ve had my friends hand-deliver stuff to him,” said Stephen Richer, a top election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, a Republican who has faced violent threats for saying the 2020 election was secure.

“We’ve pulled out more stops than most people have available to try to put accurate information in front of (Musk),” Richer added. “It has been unsuccessful.”

“What Elon Musk is doing – the campaigning that he’s doing, the donations that he is making, the way he has engineered Twitter to be a maelstrom of conservative disinformation – is far closer to election interference than any of the allegations that conservatives have made against social media platforms from 2016 to 2022,”



https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/31/politics ... index.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ ... on/680463/

https://www.inquirer.com/politics/elect ... 41031.html

https://apnews.com/article/x-musk-twitt ... 8461e8005d

[Simon of the Playa]

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