In September, the publication of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson's biography of the American billionaire, led to much discussion about the brutality of the businessman's management methods, his concerns for civilization and the power his satellites give him in international relations. Not as amply debated was the educational treatise that appears between the lines: "I'm raising my child to go to Mars."
What Silicon Valley does with its children has become a topic of interest since it became known – precisely thanks to another biography by Isaacson – that Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, didn't allow his children to play with tablets. This argument is often used in debates about screens in every country. Yet the fact that the Apple co-founder claimed to be sterile to deny being the father of his eldest daughter and not to pay child support before contesting the results of a DNA test, and then settled the matter so as not to disrupt Apple's IPO, should prompt us not to make him an education benchmark.
But back to Musk, who regularly urges people to have as many children as possible to save civilization. The 52-year-old says he has set an example by having 11 (so far) of his own. To mock Lucid Motors, an electric car manufacturer in competition with Tesla (of which he is director general), he tweeted in 2022: "I had more kids in Q2 [2021] than they made cars!" While mathematically approximate, Musk indeed had three children that quarter: a daughter with the Canadian artist Grimes, with whom he already had a son, and two conceived by assisted reproductive technology with Shivon Zilis, a senior executive at his start-up Neuralink and an "intellectual companion," cautiously wrote biographer. The former learned of the latter's existence during her pregnancy, while the surrogate mother of her daughter conceived with Musk and Musk's "colleague" was under medical supervision at the same maternity ward. Before these three, the billionaire had already had six children with his first wife, Justine Wilson: a first son (deceased), a pair of twins and triplets. After the three he had in 2021, he had an 11th child with Grimes.
As is well known, the youngest of the 11 have first names mixing the periodic table and mythology, a clear marker of people who read too much science fiction growing up. The Musk children also have nicknames (the latest, Techno Mechanicus, is called Tau, for example), which must make life easier for those around them. Isaacson's biography is full of photos of the multibillionaire with his children at work.
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