Elon Musk is the father of 12 children, including a pair of twins and a set of triplets with his ex-wife Justine Wilson and two boys and a girl with ex-girlfriend Grimes
Elon Musk’s family keeps on growing.
Within two decades, the Tesla founder has become a father of 12 children with three women. His first child was born in 2002 and his most recent arrived in 2024.
The first six children he shares with his ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson. After first meeting as students at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, the SpaceX CEO wed Wilson in 2000 — but after seven years of marriage and five kids, the couple officially divorced in 2008.
“Custody of our five children is split evenly,” Musk said in a 2010 Business Insider op-ed. “Almost all of my non-work waking hours are spent with my boys, and they are the love of my life.”
The entrepreneur went on to marry and divorce actress Talulah Riley twice — the first lasting from 2010 to 2012, and the second from 2013 to 2016. They never had children together.
In 2018, Musk and singer-songwriter Grimes (whose real name is Claire Boucher) were linked — and had their first child together in 2020.
Despite splitting up in September 2021 after three years, Grimes revealed in a March 2022 Vanity Fair interview that the couple had reconciled and welcomed another child via surrogate in December 2021. At the time, she also revealed that the couple wants more babies — telling the outlet, “we’ve always wanted at least three or four” — but the day the article was released, she tweeted that they had broken up again.
A few weeks prior to the arrival of their second child together, the CEO secretly fathered twins with Shivon Zilis in November 2021, according to court documents published by Insider. The twins were born in Austin, Texas.
In September 2023, a biography about Musk revealed that he and Grimes had secretly welcomed a third child. They named their second son Techno Mechanicus, who also goes by “Tau.”
Musk became a dad again in early 2024. He welcomed baby No. 12 — whose name has yet to be disclosed — with Zilis.
During an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, Musk spoke about his children’s futures. He shared that he has no plans to “automatically” give his children shares of his companies “if they have no interest or inclination or ability to manage” his empire.
Learn more about Musk’s family, below.
Nevada Alexander
Musk had his first son, Nevada Alexander, with his first wife, Justine Wilson in 2002. Sadly, at 10 weeks old, he passed away from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
“Nevada went down for a nap, placed on his back as always, and stopped breathing,” Wilson wrote in a 2010 essay for Marie Claire. “By the time the paramedics resuscitated him, he had been deprived of oxygen for so long that he was brain-dead.”
She continued, “He spent three days on life support in a hospital in Orange County before we made the decision to take him off it. I held him in my arms when he died.”
Vivian Jenna Wilson and Griffin
In her Marie Claire essay, Wilson details their journey to expanding their family further.
“I buried my feelings … coping with Nevada’s death by making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than two months later. Elon and I planned to get pregnant again as swiftly as possible. Within the next five years, I gave birth to twins, then triplets,” she wrote.
One of Musk’s now 18-year-old twins has filed to legally change her name and gender and said she no longer wishes to be related to her father, according to court documents obtained by PEOPLE.
The April 18 petition seeks the legal change of her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson (the maiden name of her mother, Justine Wilson); recognition of her gender as female; and the issuance of a new birth certificate to reflect the changes.
“Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,” Vivian wrote in the petition explaining her request for the changes.
In an October 2022 interview with Financial Times, Musk said he believes Vivian doesn’t want to be associated with him because of the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists. “It’s full-on communism . . . and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil,” said the Tesla CEO. “It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can’t win them all.”
Kai, Saxon and Damian
Wilson gave birth to triplets named Kai, Saxon, and Damian in 2006, two years after having twins. She revealed in a 2017 TedTalk that they were also conceived via IVF, but she and Musk have not discussed the children themselves publicly.
Musk does not often discuss his own family, but he does have strong opinions on increasing the birth rate — stating that there are “not enough people” in the world at Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO Council in December 2021.
“I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birthrate,” he said. “Please look at the numbers – if people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words.”
In a 2023 biography on the tech mogul, titled Elon Musk, author Walter Isaacson wrote about Damian, who became a vegetarian at age 8 to “decrease my carbon footprint.”
Isaacson also mentioned that Damian became a classical music prodigy who excelled in math and physics. Musk’s mom, Maye, even once told her son, “I think Damian is brighter than you.”
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X Æ A-12
Grimes and Musk welcomed their first child on May 4, 2020 after the singer announced her pregnancy with a picture of her baby bump back in January 2020. Their son X Æ A-12, whose name was later changed to X Æ A-Xii, was in part named after the CIA’s Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance plane.
Though nicknamed “X,” Grimes broke down his pronunciation in her Instagram comment section. “It’s just X, like the letter X,” she wrote. “Then A.I.,” she added. “Like how you said the letter A then I.”
But Musk explained the pronunciation differently, saying on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast that “X” is spoken “like the letter” while “the ‘Æ’ is pronounced like ‘ash.’”
While proudly stating that “A-12 was [his] contribution,” he said it was Grimes who “mostly came up with the name.” She even gave a thorough description of the meaning behind it on her Twitter.
The boy later made headlines when he joined his dad for a tense meeting at Twitter at the age of 2.
According to The Washington Post, Musk brought X Æ A-Xii to Twitter’s offices while meeting with Trust and Safety Office Yoel Roth in October 2022. The child was reportedly running around the building as Musk discussed Twitter’s future. X Æ A-Xii also made himself comfortable in the conference room, which the newspaper reported “was strewn with toys.”
In April 2023, X Æ A-Xii tagged along with his dad to the MMA Global Possible Conference in Miami. The little boy was seen playing with Musk on stage, which the audience found heartwarming.
Four months later, Grimes opened up about her son’s love of spacecraft. “X knows a lot about rockets. It’s crazy,” she explained. “He knows more about rockets than me.”
She even admitted that she was worried about his “obsession with space” after SpaceX’s Starship rocket exploded after takeoff in April.
“When X saw Starship blow up, he had, like, a three-day PTSD meltdown,” the mom of two said. “Every hour, he was waking up and going, ‘Starship …’ and I had to rub his back.”
Strider and Azure
Walter Isaacson/Twitter
Musk secretly welcomed twins, son Strider and daughter Azure, with Shivon Zilis in November 2021, according to court documents published by Insider on July 6. The twins were born in Austin, Texas — just weeks before he and Grimes welcomed a baby girl via a surrogate.
The papers reveal that in April, Musk and Zilis — who is the project director at his Neuralink company — asked a Texan county court to change their babies’ names so they would “have their father’s last name and contain their mother’s last name as part of their middle name.”
The parents revealed the babies’ names and sexes in September 2023, when they were 16 months old.
Exa Dark Sideræl
Grimes revealed a year later in a Vanity Fair interview that she welcomed a baby girl via surrogate in December 2021, three months after the couple’s public breakup. Named Exa Dark Sideræl, the singer-songwriter explained that her name has double meaning.
Exa refers to a supercomputing term, exaFLOPS, while Dark represents “the unknown.” She explained to the outlet, “People fear it but truly it’s the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe.”
The third part of Y’s full name, Sideræl, is pronounced “sigh-deer-ee-el,” according to Vanity Fair. Grimes described the word as “a more elven” spelling of sidereal, which she defined as “the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time.”
The second meaning of Sideræl is a nod to Grimes’ favorite Lord of the Rings character, Galadriel, who “chooses to abdicate the ring.”
In March 2023, Grimes shared a rare photo of her daughter on Twitter — and revealed that the little girl is going by a new name.
“Normally we [don’t] post her for her privacy, but she’s fairly unrecognizable here since shes channeling Goku,” the mom-of-two wrote in the comments, referring to a Dragon Ball character. The photo showed Musk’s youngest in a red onesie with super blonde spiked hair.
In a separate comment, Grimes said: “She’s Y now, or ‘Why?’ or just ‘?’ (But the government won’t recognize that). curiosity, the eternal question, .. and such.”
In August, Grimes described her younger child as “a little engineer,” and said, “she likes industrial shipping. She’s very strange.”
Techno Mechanicus
Journalist Walter Isaacson’s biography about Musk revealed the birth of the Tesla founder’s third child with Grimes. The couple secretly welcomed a second son, Techno Mechanicus, who also goes by “Tau.”
Elon Musk’s Baby No. 12
In June 2024, Musk confirmed the arrival of his 12th child (and third with Neuralink Corp.’s director of special projects, Shivon Zilis). The baby’s name and birth date have yet to be released.
