Elon Musk's baby mama drama matters

Elon Musk's baby mama drama matters
MAGA masculinity is getting weirder — and making men lonelier

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published April 21, 2025 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) There is so much jaw-dropping weirdness in the Wall Street Journal report about Elon Musk's apparent baby-making fetish. Musk reached out to random women he's never met and asked to impregnate them. He bribed women to have babies with hints of massive paydays, but then reneged on the deal when they asked for normal father behavior, like acknowledging paternity. He demanded one baby mama have a C-section because he thinks vaginal delivery shrinks baby brains. He wanted to hire a fleet of surrogate mothers, so he could build a "legion" of children by keeping many women pregnant at once. And low-key what made me laugh hardest, Musk texted a right-wing influencer he'd knocked up with, "Men are made for war. Real men, anyway," which he followed up with, "I am in full war mode. Going to the front lines today. Must win PA." (He was referring to his speech at a campaign rally for Donald Trump.)

But what struck me — and often strikes me in the coverage of Musk's spiral into a total crank — is how the richest man in the world seems lonely. He's alienated from normal human interaction, which unmoored him from reality. He's trying to build a compound in Austin, Texas, "where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences," like he's a polygamist Mormon in the Warren Jeffs mode. But it seems he has few, if any, takers to live near him. His interactions with the women and their children seem mostly through lawyers and his financial manager. He keeps one small son around all the time, but calls him an "emotional support human," as if he's an object and not a child. Musk has over a dozen kids, but doesn't seem to have a family.

....(snip)....

If anything, Musk's behavior is a symptom of a growing problem in the MAGA world: The obsession with masculinity, fueled by social media, is getting stranger. In the online competition for attention, people constantly seek attention with extreme and outlandish behavior. Combined with the hyper-focus on "proving" manhood on the right, it's resulting in a "top this" attitude that leads men to scale up their aggression, exaggerate their gender performance in cartoonish ways, and, of course, try to "win" at being the cruelest misogynist. In the process, these influencers are encouraging their audiences to act in ways that are harmful not just to others, but to themselves — often primarily to themselves.

....(snip)....

It's the male version of the "Mar-a-Lago" face, where right-wing people distort their looks to exaggerate gender to the point of grotesquerie. The diet trends pushed in the "manosphere" would give any doctor a headache: mostly meat, very few vegetables, and often eating food raw, which is risking illness. Even a scrawny "manfluencer" like Jordan Peterson was claiming to eat a beef-only diet, which would destroy your bowels and is terrible for your heart. Trump's HHS Secretary, Robert Kennedy, mucks around in this world, unconvincingly claiming his over-muscled frame is merely due to diet and exercise and making ludicrous claims that frying food in beef tallow is good for you. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/21/elon-musks-baby-mama-drama-matters/