Elon Musk's Family Values

Elon's "legion" of babies, the plateauing of the "nones," questioning ADHD and more in this week's digest.

This Holy Week a shorter roundup on Thursday since tomorrow is Good Friday.

Elon Musk’s Family Values

The Wall Street Journal ran an exposé on Elon Musk’s relationships with the various mothers of his children.

Musk refers to his offspring as a “legion,” a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire.

During St. Clair’s pregnancy, Musk suggested that they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.”

He has recruited potential mothers on his social-media platform X, according to some of the people.

…

Speaking to an audience at an investment conference in Saudi Arabia last year, Musk laid out the urgency of the matter. “I think for most countries, they should view the birthrate as the single biggest problem they need to solve. If you don’t make new humans, there’s no humanity, and all the policies in the world don’t matter,” Musk told the crowd over a live video.

When the interviewer joked that Musk was doing his part to address the issue, the billionaire agreed. “Yes. I am. I mean, you know, you’ve got to walk the talk. So, I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids.”

…

Cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong was covering disgraced crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall when Musk started liking and replying to her posts. Musk’s interactions ramped up as Fong posted more political content in support of Trump, and Musk followed her last summer.

That sort of attention from Musk on X, where he has 219 million followers, sent droves of followers to Fong, which was a financial boon. More engagement meant more earnings for her as part of a revenue-sharing program for creators on X.

During the height of her interactions with the billionaire owner, Fong earned $21,000 on the platform in a two-week period in November, according to a screenshot she posted.

That was about when Musk sent her a direct message asking if she was interested in having his child, according to people familiar with the matter. The two had never met in person.

While reading, it’s important to keep in mind that the elite media like the Journal are basically running an attack campaign against Elon Musk. They’ll publish almost any negative piece they can come up with.

Also, this piece reads like it was created in collaboration with Ashley St. Clair or her PR people. It’s mostly a writeup of material from her, has flattering photos of her and her baby (this after her pleas for privacy), and it does not discuss any of the many credible allegations or negative facts about her, for example. This article should be a warning any man to avoid getting involved with an online female personality.

But there’s little reason to think this material isn’t true. Musk has been pumping out kids right and left with different women. The article says, “Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known.” This is very possible.

We also know Musk isn’t exactly an engaged dad. It’s again all too believable that he’d treat his baby mothers poorly.

Elon Musk is a unique individual. But this sort of thing is a preview of coming attractions if the atheist techno-right or transhumanist visions of the future win out. Designer babies (aka eugenics), large scale IVF surrogacy or artificial wombs, cyber or other forms of human augmentation (don’t forget Musk has a company that’s developing brain-computer interfaces), polygamous family structures and more. Cyberpunk may turn out to be prophetic.

The Plateau Is Real

Ryan Burge, who wrote the book on the rise of the “nones”, or those without any particular religion, is out with an interesting post noting that the rise in the nones has plateaued.

But look back at that bar graph for both 2019 and 2020. The overall share of nones was 35% during that time period. For the samples collected in 2021, 2022, and 2023 the portion who were non-religious was between 35% and 36%. In the most recent data collected less than six months ago the percentage was down to 34%. In other words, there’s been no discernible change in the nones in the United States in the last five years. If anything, there’s a hint that things are actually moving very slowly in the other direction.

Here’s the chart he’s talking about:

He does note that religious attendance has continued to decline. But he has an interesting observation about Gen Z:

Here’s the other piece of this that I think is a pretty interesting result - the religious attendance of Gen Z is actually pretty robust compared to other generations. In 2024, 24% of Gen Z were attending weekly - that was two points higher than Millennials and Gen X. While 53% of Gen Z are attending less than once a year, that’s actually the lowest percentage of any generation in this analysis. Maybe, just maybe Generation Z is more religiously engaged than their parents or grandparents.

He has a chart of that, so be sure to click over to see it.

He also posted a sobering piece about how high school students are growing more “anti-social.”

High School Students Are Growing Incredibly Anti-Social

Rethinking ADHD

The New York Times ran a major feature questioning ADHD as a diagnosis, and whether medicating boys for it is a good idea.

That ever-expanding mountain of pills rests on certain assumptions: that A.D.H.D. is a medical disorder that demands a medical solution; that it is caused by inherent deficits in children’s brains; and that the medications we give them repair those deficits. Scientists who study A.D.H.D. are now challenging each one of those assumptions — and uncovering new evidence for the role of a child’s environment in the progression of his symptoms.

As I read this, I couldn’t help but ask myself what it means to “trust the science” in a situation such as this. As the article puts it, “A significant part of the A.D.H.D. establishment does, in fact, promote the message that children and adolescents who resist medication don’t know what’s good for them.”

Rather than a push by schools to medicate boys, Freddie deBoer takes a different view of this, asking if ADHD is spread by social contagion and consumer demand.

This weekend the Times released a long piece looking at the ever-escalating rates of ADHD diagnoses and what exactly they tell us. What’s in the piece is fine - of course, the ADHD activist class doesn’t like it - but what’s remarkable is what isn’t in it. Once again, there’s just about zero consideration of ADHD as a social contagion, any recognition that there is now a vast and deeply annoying ADHD culture online that acts as a kind of evangelical movement for a neurodevelopment disorder. There are millions of people on ADHD TikTok and ADHD Tumblr and ADHD Twitter. There’s a vast universe of facile memes, dubious statistics, and self-flattering nostrums about ADHD floating around out there, and increasingly they’re penetrating into broader internet culture. (I am genuinely unaware of a subculture that is more directly and shamelessly self-celebrating than the online ADHD community, and I’ve read the comments at LessWrong.) Unsurprisingly, a big subsidiary industry has sprung up, with all kinds of products and services for sale, books and apparel and tchotchkes and conferences and boutique forms of therapy and exclusive members-only Discords…. Whether neurodevelopmental disorders should have merch is an open question. What’s not subject to questioning is that this is happening. Five minutes of cursory searching would reveal the remarkable scope of online ADHD culture. And yet the piece’s author, Paul Tough, is just about totally silent on this glaring reality.

As always, deBoer’s rhetoric is fantastic to read.

The politicization and growth of online communities in the disability world is very real. I’m sure this creates incentives to get diagnosed with ADHD or autism. But there are similar dynamics in the deaf community, and no one denies that deafness is real. Just as we’ve over diagnosed certain things, it’s all to easy to over-correct in the other direction.

Best of the Web

Anthony Bradley: The Father Factor: Faith, Family, and the Church's Misguided Priorities

Skyler Kressin: To the Ashes of Our Fathers

The Atlantic: Grandparents Are Reaching Their Limits - I see multiple kinds of Boomer grandparenting models. One is like this, where grandparents are making very high investments in their grandchildren (and maybe being taken advantage of by their kids). But another common one is when grandparents do nothing, and focus entirely on having fun in their retirement, continuing an essentially self-oriented view of life.

Jonathan Haidt: Snapchat is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale - Snapchat is one app few adults use and know much about. Tik Tok gets all the press, but apparently a lot of young people still use Snapchat.

The Atlantic: Why Am I So Tired? - The specific exhaustion of being a mother

Rod Dreher: As Goes Trust, So Goes Authority

This week, I was a guest on the Contratalk podcast talking about why young men and women aren’t getting married.

And on my own podcast, special guest Tanner Greer joined me to talk about the cultural roots of the loss of the can-do spirit in America.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Happy Easter, everyone!