Fathering lost children

“An excellent wife who can find?” asks the King Lemuel in Proverbs, kicking off one of the more stressful passages for female readers of the Bible, at least in the modern era. Is the question rhetorical? If King Lemuel is just a pseudonym for Solomon, he obviously gave it a try before concluding that the task was impossible.

It had not occurred to me, ever, to think of Elon Musk through the lens of King Solomon, chiefly because King Solomon was in the line of the Savior, Jesus, and wrote large portions of Scripture (in spite of having 700 wives and 300 concubines). Elon Musk, on the other hand, is, if not lacking in common sense, at least suffers under a deficit of wisdom when it comes to women and the rearing of children. But the title of The Wall Street Journal’s deep dive into Musk’s “personal” affairs brought that ancient King to mind. Despite all the money he was willing to spend, Ashley St. Clair, whose baby with Musk is named Romulus, succeeded at bringing his “harem drama” into the national conversation. The frustration of the women who have born his children is now open to public scrutiny, as well as his failed efforts to persuade intelligent women, like cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong, to have “his child” even though the “two had never met in person.”

According to the Journal, Musk refers to his children as a “Legion.” He is, of course, thinking in terms of Roman military practices—the article uses the word “tactics” over and over—of strength and intelligence. He probably hasn’t read the New Testament well enough to hear the evocative resonance of the demoniac in the synoptic Gospels. “Legion” isn’t an army of children technologically assembled to save the world, but a host of demons devouring a man. And so, as frequently happens, Christians are offered yet another moment of private irony as the unseen spiritual world collides with the technologically amoral assumptions of America’s new elite.

Dana Mattioli reports that Musk has, at least, 14 children, though “multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur” believe the number to be “much higher than publicly known.” Musk is part of a growing “pronatalist movement” that views the falling birthrate in Western countries with apocalyptic anxiety. Part of being “pronatalism” is to concentrate almost exclusively on the “natalism” at the expense of all other considerations, like the well-being of the women who have the children, and, indeed, the children themselves if their mothers don’t follow Musk’s strict non-disclosure policies.

One detail about Musk’s view of “family” and babies seems to rather neatly capture his views. Mattioli writes that while Ashley St. Clair was pregnant, not from surrogacy, but in the old fashioned, probably soon to be obsolete way, “Musk urged her to deliver the baby via caesarean section and told her he didn’t want the child to be circumcised.” And this, it seems from an X post in which Musk was opining about optimal circumstances for the birthing of babies, is that “vaginal births limit brain size and that C-sections allow for larger brains.”

From a spiritual perspective, this is the most utilitarian view of the person that I can imagine but is also biologically short-sighted. For it is intriguingly hypothesized that numerous benefits redound to the child from going through the birth canal, among them being the development of the infant’s microbiome as well as protection against autoimmune diseases. Assuming Musk knows of this, brain size for him must then be more crucial than more holistic health concerns. And that, it seems, must be why he is willing to pay fabulous amounts of money to women to have his children, but is not willing to consider the implications of life in its fullness, both now or forever more.

For Christians, several things have to be true at once. Children are a heritage from the Lord, but they do best when they are the provenance of an excellent wife together with a husband who doesn’t dwell overlong on King Lemuel’s well pointed rhetorical question, but lays down his life for the ones he loves. Musk’s strong instinct to save civilization is good, but a world full of lost children, looking for their father, carrying in themselves the grief and alienation of their mother who could not tempt his love, is not actually a “civilization.” It is more akin to barbarism. It is that cruel Roman might that conquered but, ultimately, crumbled for lack of wisdom and love.