As Elon Musk strutted around the CPAC stage on Thursday in a pair of garish sunglasses, waving a chainsaw and cracking cringe-worthy jokes, the mother of his children was publicly pleading with him to stop ignoring her requests for help with their kid’s health emergency.
Grimes, a Canadian singer who shares three children with Musk, directed a series of messages to the world’s wealthiest man on X, the website he owns, urging him to respond to her requests for help.
“Plz respond about our child’s medical crisis. I am sorry to do this publicly but it is no longer acceptable to ignore this situation. This requires immediate attention,” she wrote in a reply to one of Musk’s tweets.
She also wrote that the child could suffer a “life-long impairment” if Musk didn’t respond quickly, before posting again two hours later to say that her messages had been ignored.
The tragic split-screen is just the latest in a series of accusations against Musk over absentee parenting.
It comes just a week after conservative influencer Ashley St Clair, who recently announced she had given birth to Musk’s child, was also forced to take to the Tesla CEO's media platform to get his attention after claiming he had ignored her calls.
“Elon, we have been trying to communicate for the past several days and you have not responded,” she said. “When are you going to reply to us instead of publicly responding to smears from an individual who just posted photos of me in underwear at 15 years old?”
Those two episodes prompted waves of X users to accuse the site’s owner of being a “deadbeat dad.” And it’s not the first time the accusation has been leveled at him.
The billionaire — a self-described “pronatalist” who has repeatedly stated that he believes in having a high number of kids as a way to combat what he sees as a looming “population collapse” — has 13 children with four women, some of whom are believed to have been conceived through IVF.
Musk has reportedly offered his sperm to friends and acquaintances and said in 2021: “I try to set a good example. Gotta practice what I preach.”
But while he is clearly keen to produce as many offspring as possible, being a father to those children appears to be less of a concern.
The public appeals from the mothers of Musk’s children stand in stark contrast to the patronly image he has tried to portray while working in the public eye on his various business and political ventures.
Musk, 53, brought his four-year-old son X Æ A-Xii, to the Oval Office with him for a high-profile press conference alongside President Donald Trump earlier this month. After seeing the clip online, the child’s mother, Grimes, shared her displeasure with his newfound exposure.
“He should not be in public like this,” she wrote on Musk’s social media platform X.
The billionaire and Grimes have two other children: Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus.
Musk also brought some of his children with him to a high-level meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
But his own family says that behind the scenes, Musk’s commitment to being a father leaves much to be desired. Musk’s father, Errol Musk, said as much in an interview earlier this month.
“No, he hasn’t been a good father,” the elder Musk said of his son. “The first child was too much with nannies and died in the care of a nanny. If Elon hears this, he’s going to shoot me or something,” said Errol.
Elon’s first child, Nevada Alexander, who he had with his first wife Justine, died at the age of 10 weeks from Sudden Death Syndrome.
“Then he had five children, each one had their own nanny. It was a weird situation. He didn’t spend enough time with them,” Errol added.
One of Musk’s own children has even spoken out against him. In 2022, his trans daughter Vivian Wilson petitioned a court to legally change her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson (the maiden name of her mother, Justine Wilson) and to recognize her gender as female, stating that she no longer wished "to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
Musk said in an interview with the Financial Times that same year that he believes Vivian doesn't want to be associated with him because of the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists.
The spat worsened when Musk began publicly saying that his “son is dead,” referring to Vivian, who he said had been killed by the “woke mind virus.”
Vivian responded to the frequent outbursts by her estranged father in an interview with NBC, describing him as “cold,” “very quick to anger,” and “uncaring and narcissistic.”
“He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness,” she wrote in response to one of Musk’s posts about her.
Musk’s relationship with his children has come under closer scrutiny since he has taken a high-profile role in Trump’s administration, which has positioned itself as a defender of family values.
Speaking at CPAC this week, just hours before Musk was on stage, Vice President JD Vance explained the administration’s position on family values.
“We’ve got to persuade our fellow citizens to stop thinking about babies as inconveniences to be discarded. We’ve got to start thinking of them as blessings to cherish, and that’s exactly what I promised to do,” Vance said.
