Elon Musk may want to go to Mars, but he’s also a big proponent of growing the population of Earth.
He wants to “create a legion of children before the civil war,” his ex-girlfriend Ashley St. Clair says in Musk, Alex Gibney‘s new documentary about the SpaceX founder, now in theaters. Never mind that Elon’s relationship track record isn’t exactly stellar.
The film happens to be opening on the heels of Shivon Zillis‘ Oct. 2 announcement on Xthat she had been “let go”—personally, that is—”without warning,” apparently just days after Elon had messaged her a declaration of love.
The Neuralink executive—who shares 4-year-old twins Striderand Azure, daughter Arcadia, 2, and son Seldon, whose arrival she confirmed in February 2025, with Elon—indicated that the temperature of the breakup hadn’t yet been taken, noting in the post, “I do hope and pray he and I can be great friends and coparents.”
Count Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk—who shares five children with the Tesla CEO—among those who may not have been surprised by her ex-husband’s latest uncoupling.
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Elon Musk’s Complicated Family Tree
“Somebody on Elon’s side referred to us as ‘the breeders,'” she says in Musk, referring to the women her ex-husband has fathered 14 known children with. “And there’s a playbook, you know, it’s kind of like an assembly line by now.”
Jojo Korsh/BFA.com/, SAUL LOEB / AFP
Musk, 55, has been clear that he thinks people should be reproducing more, saying in 2024 that having a kid “is the most optimistic thing that somebody can do.”
Otherwise, he has spoken sparingly about his own personal life over the years, and he distanced himself from this film early on. In an exchange revisited in the doc, Musk first labeled the project “a hit piece” in 2023, to which Gibney replied on X, “How would you know?”
After Musk premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last month, the titular subject again called the documentary—which he did not participate in—”a hit piece that misses,” charging that it “makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours.”
E! News reached out to Tesla PR for comment but did not hear back.
But whether or not you know Starlink from Starship, read on for what Musk revealed about Elon’s personal life:
Jesse Grant/WireImage, Jason Merritt/WireImage
“It was easy to be with him for long stretches of time, and that made up for all the arguing,” Justine reminisced in Alex Gibney’s 2026 documentary Musk, recalling how they’d go to bookstores and “sit and eat croissants and read together.”
“It sounds simple,” she noted, “but it was kind of blissful.”
“Our way of reacting to Nevada’s death was to get pregnant as quickly as possible,” Justine said in the doc. To “somehow learn how to live” with the loss, she wanted to “create a story in a way that was healing.”
Twins Vivian Jenna and Griffin were born in 2004 after “a few tries” with IVF, she said, but triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian “happened like that,” arriving in 2006.
“Then he would make a joke or tell you 15 things that were wrong with you, and you would cry,” she recalled of Elon, who filed for divorce in 2008. “And then three hours later, or three days later—or maybe a week later—it would be like, ‘Let’s go to the movies.'”
Elon has said little over the years about his first marriage, but in a Jan. 1 reply to an X user who posted Justine’s 2014 TEDx Talk, “The Art of the Deep Yes,” he called her “an amazing woman.”
E! News reached out to Tesla PR regarding Justine’s comments in the film but did not hear back.
After Musk premiered Sept. 8 at the Venice Film Festival, Elon replied to an X post listing people who participated in the film, including Justine and his ex-girlfriend Ashley St. Clair, writing, “Gibney just assembled a hit list of people who either have an axe to grind or don’t even know me (but still have an axe to grind).”
They met in San Francisco and, soon after, he invited her to Providence, R.I.
In the hotel, she shared in Musk, “I’m falling asleep with him while he’s listening to an audiobook or a podcast about Kublai Khan. I was just sitting there, like, am I dreaming? Is this really what he’s going asleep to?”
The 1200s-era Mongolian emperor, a grandson of Genghis Khan, had 22 sons with his four wives, another 25 sons with his various concubines, and at least a few daughters, according to The Travels of Marco Polo.
When Ashley started seeing Elon, she said in Musk, “the story I got was that things were amicable with Claire and that Shivon, it was platonic and they just have kids together.” (Elon and Grimes had a messy custody battle that was closed in Texas in August 2024, while Shivon announced the end of her romantic relationship with Elon a week before Musk’s Oct. 9 release.)
Before Ashley and Elon’s son Romulus was born in September 2024, she was worried about “this all blowing up and only being seen as Elon Musk’s baby mama,” Ashley said in the doc. “And he was very kind about it. But the moment I had our kid, that was all gone.
She cracked, “It’s like a Gatling gun of sperm in his DMs.”
Elon “told me that he wanted to use surrogates,” Ashley said, “because it was the only way we could create a legion of children before the civil war.”
Justine said in Musk, referring to the women who’ve had children with her ex-husband, including herself, “I always felt we were pretty interchangeable in this story.”
Asked who she meant, she replied, “The breeders,” explaining, “Somebody on Elon’s side referred to us as ‘the breeders.’ And there’s a playbook, you know, it’s kind of like an assembly line by now.”
Grimes told Vanity Fair in 2022 that, while she felt that “kids need to stay out of it,” as in whatever was being said about her and Elon, but that “X is just out there,” with his father “really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything.”
In 2023, Elon called then-3-year-old X his “emotional support human.”
At the Venice Film Festival, Ashley said during a Musk panel that not signing allowed her to participate in the film, to “set the example for my kids that you should never take being materially comfortable over speaking the truth.”
Elon wrote on X the next day, “She was never offered that and has a history of making false claims.”
Ashley pushed back on the I’ve Had It podcast days later, calling Elon’s comment a “serious accusation.”
“I am in law school,” she continued, “and I am gonna have to pass the character and fitness test for the bar. I think that is a very serious allegation to make, that I have a history of making false claims—which I do not—and I do not plan on letting that slide lightly.”
He told her that, while growing up, “he had this habit of jerking awake because he was afraid something terrible was going to happen to him, something violent.”
She “understood Elon better in some ways” when she met his father, Errol Musk, Justine notes. “They both used the same language when they were insulting each other, or insulting you, as a woman.”
When Jenna was transitioning, the author says, “instead of trying to understand her point of view, Elon was telling her through telling the world what that point of view actually was.”
Elon—who wrote on X in 2025 that his child was “killed by the woke mind virus”—”never tried to repair things,” Justine says. “That’s not in his nature. If a relationship ruptures, then it ruptures.”
Moreover, she notes, “we actually went through the actual death of an actual child, and…this is a child growing up. She’s Jenna.”
