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Notes -
WSJ Article on Elon Musk's Reproductive Habits
(Side note: I know WSJ is paywalled. Can one of you internet heroes find an alt link?)Thanks to @zoink:
Archive Link: https://archive.is/EVkGv
It's pretty weird. Musk, according to the article, references his children, collectively, as his "legion." He has a vision of a sort of compound in Texas for all of the women he's reproduced with along with the children. The cult vibes only get stronger until they run into cold hearted legal recourse. It appears, from the article, that drawn out family court proceedings, estrangement, and some sort of financial settlement are par for the course with Musk. Effective co-parenting or an amicable albeit non-exclusive relationship? Odds are low.
I've always been suspicious of Musk because a few reasons, but I'll decline to elaborate on those specifics in order to bring up a broader culture war point.
While "pronatalism" (loosely defined) is so hot right now on the right, there are some pretty major fractures beneath the surface. A lot of them have to do, unsurprisingly, with the centrality and importance of a stable nuclear family. Next to "the economy" (whatever that may mean), issue and topics of the family, I believe, are of paramount importance when drawing cultural and political lines. In the pronatal sphere, I see a two camp (at least) breakdown:
Have All The Babies All The Time (HAT-BAT) - This is firmly where Musk is king. The idea is simple mathematics with a dash of eugenics; if you are a "worthy man" have as many babies as possible. Multiple women? Fine. Selecting women based on your own rubric of "genetic desirability" also fine. This is where HBDers put their rubber to the road.
Have All The Babies And Raise Them In a Family (HAT-ARF) - This is the providence of traditional religious groups and a particular kind of secular cultural conservative (often, it's kind of hard to distinguish between these two subgroups because the latter will play-act at the religious part without really meaning it).
While it might seem that HAT-BAT and HAT-ARF might be able to leave each to their own and agree on "yay babies," I suspect that HAT-ARF will, quickly, stop to say "wait a minute, you actually have to raise your kids. A ton of data says that broken families have horrible social outcomes." And that right there is a major culture war split.
I'm a pronatalist, in the broadest sense possible, yet I do think it's too much to ask to necessarily tie that to some sort of religious requirement. Yet, I also don't see anyway to build functional societies without a nuclear family as the foundational unit. Spreading The Worthy Male Seed was the de facto method of world population for thousands of years. (Insert the stat here on how everyone in Central Asia is Genghis Khan's grandson/daughter). The result was a lot of continuation of the de facto state of man - war, strife, instability, and short lives. The formalization of monogamous marriage and all of the social and legal codes and laws that fractal out from there was a 2000+ year slow process that resulted in the stabilizing of families, of societies, and preservation of pro-social cultures. Destabilization of the family (sexual revolution etc.) has destabilized society and culture. Looking at it that way, the "Musk Mode" pronatalism is far more regressive that he - or others with similar strategies - would like to admit.
Thoughts:
-- It's weird that they make St. Clair out to a/the victim in all this. I have approximately zero sympathy for her in all this. What's with all these conservative influencers being such weird sluts once you wave a few million in front of them? "We already know you're a whore, we're just haggling about the price."
-- There's a recent local crime story that I might or might not write a bigger piece about, but in a nutshell a local teenager ran away from home, her stepdad turned a little nutty harassing people, rumors swirled about allegations of abuse within the family, they found her and she was trying to hustle a living as some kind of e-girl selling pics. In local gossip, someone said something like "Oh, well I guess it turns out the stepdad wasn't abusive, she was just a crazy whore." And I was flabbergasted, "Dude, how do you think fourteen year olds turn into weird whores? It's normally because of abuse in the home..." P(B:A) is pretty strong here. Anyway, I feel the same way about Musk's trans-existence feud with his erstwhile daughter. The Jeff Younger story was illustrative to me: in the divorce proceedings it came out that Younger had done things like pretend to be a PhD uni professor during the dating process and tried to do some kind of weird pseudo boot camp shit whenever he got visitation with his sons. There's a point at which I feel like I run into all these conservative dads who become big culture war talking points saying their sons/daughters were stolen from them, and there's part of me that asks, my brother in Christ, who raised your kids? The sole trans kid I personally grew up with, and know at a family level, had extremely conservative parents.
-- Elon's harem-eunuch complains about problems they've had with "crazy women." Well, yeah, you're gonna get nothing but crazy women when you offer to father a kid on them, in exchange for a bunch of money but no commitment.
-- The reason lots of billionaires don't do this is because they don't want a bunch of heirs. Probably because they actually have some affection for their wives and/or children. Rupert Murdoch has only six or seven kids, and it's a fucking mess out there. Elon doesn't have those kinds of human feelings to worry about, I guess.
It sure is. Check this article out. Even though it was in The Atlantic which makes it kinda a hitpiece on Rupert, his family is pretty much the basis for the tv series Succession.
Oddly, CBS Viacom had an almost parallel series of succession crises when Sumner Redstone stepped down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumner_Redstone?wprov=sfti1#
Just one of those things about media billionaires I guess. All the more reason to imagine how it goes with 20 or more children who have mostly been formally or informally abandoned by their trillionaire father.
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