A battle has broken out on the American right. Two visions of what it means to have children are contending for supremacy. On one side stands the genetic-determinist right, which celebrates people with “good genes” who have children together inside or outside of wedlock, ideally with the aid of embryo selection and genetic screening. On the other side is the culturalist right, which insists on the importance of marriage and monogamy. The outcome of this battle is more important than most people realize. It will determine which conception of human excellence will guide Western societies in the twenty-first century.
Not so long ago, the right was seen as the bastion of traditionalism, uniformly supportive, in principle if not in practice, of family values. It deplored single mothers and absentee fathers, not merely from religious conviction, but in the belief that the presence of a married mother and father was the best way to ensure that a child would grow up to be happy, productive, and law-abiding. But that view has come under assault—not only from the anti-judgmental left with its rainbow of “family types,” but from new voices on the right who regard genes as the be-all and end-all. Heredity, they insist, is a vastly more powerful predictor of outcomes than parental influence.
Elon Musk embodies the values of the genetic-determinist right. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and head of DOGE has fathered twelve children with three different women—including, most recently, a colleague with whom he had no intention of forming a family. A fourth woman, the conservative commentator Ashley St. Clair, claims to have given birth to a thirteenth Musk child last year. (Musk has not responded to St. Clair’s claim as of this writing.)
Far from censuring him for deviating from traditional norms, parts of the right have celebrated Musk, often in eugenic terms. Matt Gaetz, the former Republican congressman from Florida, hailed St. Clair’s announcement on X: “This child has incredible genetics.” Another user declared, “Elon Musk is acting just as one would act if one took behavioral genetics seriously. Post-natal parental impact isn’t that important.”
In the early twentieth century, eugenic ideas gained a wide hearing among American elites. The foundations set up by Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller funded research and political advocacy of methods that promised to root out (in the words of Margaret Sanger) “defectives, delinquents and dependents.” The same purportedly scientific rationales for improving the human stock are now used to justify the behavior of Musk and other masters of the universe. The upshot is jarring. When a lower-class man fathers many children with different women, his behavior is derided as irresponsible. When Elon Musk impregnates woman after woman with no intention of giving the children a stable family, his behavior is celebrated as an act of benevolence, blessing the human race with his great genes.
On this view, Musk is not an erring man, imperfectly pursuing a monogamous ideal. He is advancing a genes-are-king version of right-wing “family values.”
“If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad,” Musk told his biographer Ashlee Vance in 2015. A colleague at his neurotechnology firm, the executive Shivon Zilis, was receptive to this message. “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” Zilis told the Musk biographer Walter Isaacson. When she decided to act on Musk’s advice and have a child by means of in vitro fertilization, Musk volunteered to donate his sperm. Zilis agreed. “I can’t possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children,” she said.
When told about Musk’s twelve (or more) children, some may think of the old notion of the powerful man maintaining a harem. But Musk’s version of paternity differs from older patriarchal forms in its focus on genetic self-propagation rather than dynastic succession. It is forward-looking in its embrace of individual choice and technology. This difference is evident in its approach to embryo selection. After all, if one is committed to maximizing genetic outcomes, it isn’t enough merely to find a high-status mate—even if he happens to be the richest man in the world, or she a high-ranking executive at a tech company. It’s also necessary to choose carefully which embryo one brings to term, picking the one with the most desirable traits.
The possibility of picking and choosing among embryos may help explain why all of Musk’s acknowledged children, save for the first, were conceived with the help of advanced reproductive technologies. According to a report in The Information, a Silicon Valley trade magazine, Zilis and Musk have used polygenic embryo screening. This technology promises to predict not only the likelihood of a child’s one day developing ailments such as heart disease, but also its chances of having a high IQ.
Musk’s approach to mating has been applauded by members of the genetic-determinist right. Richard Hanania, a writer who speaks frequently of the genetic superiority of “elite human capital,” has praised Musk as “the one billionaire acting in accordance with evolutionary theory.”
People who believe that children are gifts, not products, and that reproduction should take place by means of sex within a lifelong, exclusive union are bound to have a more negative assessment. Musk’s ongoing baby mama drama—in February he was castigated publicly by both St. Clair and his ex-girlfriend Grimes for ignoring urgent messages regarding his children—gives his purportedly beneficent actions a bad odor. Even many defenders of Musk’s evolutionary acumen have gone strangely silent.
But any attempt to criticize the genetic-determinist right must confront a basic problem: Many people accept its premises. The ubiquity of assortative mating, by which people tend to select reproductive partners with the same class position, represents a quotidian form of the more explicit and technologically assisted “selective breeding” championed by parts of the online right.
Likewise, between 67 and 85 percent of children found to have Down syndrome in prenatal testing are aborted in the United States. Iceland boasts in its virtual elimination of Down syndrome through the destruction of children in the womb who exhibit markers. Musk’s reproductive ideas may sound strange, but they extend the eugenic logic already at work in Western societies.
Given that the use of abortion to eliminate defective children has long been part of a broader progressive agenda, it is hardly surprising that Musk was, until quite recently, a fairly conventional liberal Democrat. One reason he has given for his swing to the right is the experience of being “tricked” into signing medical documents permitting his son Xavier to undergo a gender transition as a minor. Musk complained that “it’s very possible for adults to manipulate children who are having an actual identity crisis into believing that they are the wrong gender.”
Musk is right about these abusive possibilities. But his complaint about adults manipulating their children by means of technological interventions sits uneasily with his own history of using technologies like IVF and polygenic screening to produce children with the characteristics he desires. If parents have already used invasive medical procedures to produce their “designer baby,” why should that process stop at conception? And why should that child not one day be encouraged to participate in his own self-fashioning? The same holds for trans-humanist ambitions. If we are promised immortality by uploading our identities to the digital cloud, why shouldn’t some upload their identities to a sexually reconfigured body?
Musk’s vision of reproduction suggests that death is more to be feared than dishonor, and that to avoid suffering it might be worth committing a sin. No one wants his child to be born to a life of suffering through a chromosomal abnormality. Everyone would like to see his child endowed with traits that bring him the best prospect of success. But the focus on DNA exhibited by the genetic-determinist right suggests that the good life is defined by simple possession of physical and mental strength. Likewise, indifference to the ethical arguments raised against IVF and the destruction of human embryos encourages a utilitarian mindset that is at odds with the pursuit of virtue and righteousness that are the true marks of superiority.
Eugenics lowers human horizons, even as it claims to increase human possibilities. So it is hardly surprising that Elon Musk, erstwhile avatar of the genetic-determinist right, no longer commands such vocal praise. Perhaps he really is “elite human capital,” as his admirers understand that term. Maybe he is guided by a keen understanding of evolutionary theory. But before he can be an actual hero, he will need to act in accord with a higher ideal.
