Exactly How Many Baby Mamas Does Elon Musk Have?

Dear Jess from six months ago: put down the phone and step away from the billionaire gossip.

I know exactly what you're doing right now. You're sitting in the dark in that creaky rocking chair, elbow-deep in the smell of sour milk and desperation, nursing a colicky newborn at 3 AM. You're exhausted. Your Etsy shop orders are backed up, the rural Texas heat is already seeping through the window screens, and because you can't keep your eyes open, you're endlessly scrolling through Twitter. You stumbled onto an article about tech billionaires and suddenly fell down a massive rabbit hole trying to figure out the exact headcount of his baby mamas because your sleep-deprived brain literally couldn't process the math.

I'm just gonna be real with you—the grass isn't greener over there in billionaire land, it's just fertilized with a lot more lawyers and NDAs. When you're sitting there feeling like an absolute failure because you can't afford the fancy organic purees at H-E-B and your three kids under five are currently sharing a bedroom that looks like a tornado hit it, reading about a guy populating a small village isn't going to help your postpartum anxiety.

Let me save you the two hours you're about to spend trying to draw a family tree on a spit-up rag. The exact count of women who share children with him is four. Justine Wilson, Claire Boucher (who goes by Grimes), Shivon Zilis, and Ashley St. Clair. Fourteen kids in total across those four women. If you're trying to keep track of every baby m and their respective custody agreements, you're gonna need a much bigger rag.

The absolute nightmare of coordinating that many schedules

I'm just gonna rant about the sheer logistics of fourteen kids for a second because my brain short-circuits just thinking about it. My mom always tells me 'many hands make light work,' but bless her heart, she only had two kids in the eighties when you could just throw us in the backyard with a water hose until dinner time. I lose my actual mind trying to get my three gremlins into the minivan for a simple trip to the doctor. Somebody is always missing a shoe, somebody is always hungry, and somebody is always actively plotting a meltdown in the driveway. Can you imagine the morning routine with fourteen different personalities, diets, and school drop-offs?

And the paperwork! My god, the paperwork alone would require a full-time administrative staff just to keep the vaccination records straight. Whenever I've to fill out the emergency contact forms at the start of the preschool year, my hand cramps up by page three. I can't even fathom what a birthday party looks like in that family, or how you'd manage the group text without throwing your phone straight into the nearest lake. I complain about my grocery budget on a weekly basis, but feeding a small army of growing kids—even with billions in the bank—sounds like an exhausting endless loop of meal prep and snack negotiations.

Honestly, the newest addition with the influencer is just one more name to add to the already overflowing court docket, so let's just ignore that drama completely.

The scary stuff we all lose sleep over anyway

I know part of the reason you went down this late-night rabbit hole is because you read about his first wife, Justine, losing their ten-week-old baby to SIDS, and my stomach dropped the exact same way yours did. It's the ultimate nightmare.

With my oldest son—who's basically my walking cautionary tale for everything I did wrong as a first-time mom—I was completely paralyzed by fear. My doctor, Dr. Miller, sat me down and gave me the whole 'ABCs of safe sleep' speech, telling me the crib needed to be totally empty. But then my grandma kept chiming in, telling me to just layer him up in heavy quilts and put a drop of whiskey on his gums to make him sleep, which I aggressively ignored. The medical folks say babies should be on their back with absolutely no blankets, but they also vaguely mention something about brain development and temperature drops that I never fully grasped, so I basically just spent the first six months hovering over the bassinet staring at his chest to make sure it was moving.

We were using those terrible, cheap polyester fleece sleep sacks that made him sweat buckets until I finally broke down and bought the Colorful Hedgehog Bamboo Baby Blanket. I know $45 feels like a huge chunk of our grocery budget, but it's worth every single penny. It's my absolute favorite thing we own because the bamboo blend breathes so well that I don't panic about him overheating when I wrap it tightly under his arms, and the little woodland print actually hides the sweet potato stains surprisingly well. It gave me just a tiny bit of peace of mind in those early months when everything felt terrifying.

Buying gear for multiples makes my wallet hurt

A bunch of these billionaire kids were brought into the world via IVF, resulting in two sets of twins and one set of triplets. The fertility clinic experts supposedly warn parents that multiples usually mean early deliveries and tiny babies, but they probably don't warn you about the sheer volume of plastic junk you're suddenly required to buy.

I run a small Etsy shop making custom wooden signs just to pay for my kids' diapers, so the idea of buying three of everything at the exact same time makes my chest tight. You need heavy-duty tandem strollers that cost more than my first car. You need mountains of specialized gear. When you're budgeting for twins or triplets, you really have to figure out what's actually necessary and what's just marketing garbage designed to make terrified parents open their wallets.

For example, I know you were eyeing that Cow Silicone Teether for $18 for our newest arrival because it looked aesthetic for Instagram. I'm gonna save you the trouble—it's just okay. I mean, it's totally safe and cute, but my youngest just chucks it across the living room the second I hand it to her, and the dog usually ends up chewing on it under the sofa. Save your money on that one and just let them chew on a clean, frozen washcloth exactly like our grandmas used to tell us.

Keeping their little faces off the internet

Grimes has been in the news practically begging the courts to keep her kids' lives private because she's terrified of stalkers, and while we don't have paparazzi hiding in the bushes here in rural Texas, the core issue is exactly the same.

Look, past-Jess, I know you want to post every single cute milestone on the Etsy shop's social media pages to get those algorithms working in your favor, but you really need to reel it in. Once an image is out there on the web, it's out there forever. I don't pretend to fully understand how these tech companies harvest our data or what they do with it, but I do know my kids' private moments shouldn't be floating around a server in a different country just so I can get fifty likes from strangers.

Rather than plastering their faces all over the internet and oversharing every single tantrum and leaving digital footprints everywhere for the rest of their lives, just text the cute bath time photos directly to your mom in a private group chat so she can print them out for her fridge. It's so much safer.

For the photos I do send to the grandparents, I love doing tummy time on the Organic Cotton Baby Blanket Ultra-Soft Monochrome Zebra Design. It's about $50, which again, is a bit steep, but the high-contrast black and white pattern supposedly helps their little newborn eyes focus or develop neural pathways or something like that. More importantly to me, it looks really sharp and clean in pictures without feeling tacky or overly babyish.

If you're spiraling right now about having safe, non-toxic stuff around the house like I was six months ago, you might want to look through the baby blankets collection to find a few pieces that won't make you break out in hives worrying about cheap dyes and polyester fibers against their skin.

The reality of messy splits

Whether you're a tech billionaire fighting over private jets or a regular mom fighting over who has to pay for the obscenely expensive organic toddler snacks this week, co-parenting is just inherently messy. My cousin went through a terrible divorce last year, and she always says you basically have to treat the whole thing like a rigid business transaction if you want to survive with your sanity intact.

You have to get every little detail in writing. You need ironclad boundaries. Otherwise, you're going to end up screaming at each other in a Target parking lot about weekend drop-off times while your toddler throws Cheerios at your head. It's exhausting just watching my cousin go through it, let alone living it on a global stage where everyone has an opinion on your custody agreement.

So here's my advice to you, past-Jess. Stop worrying about what the billionaires are doing. Stop reading the tabloids at 3 AM. You're doing fine. You're a good mom. Your kids are loved, even if they're currently wearing hand-me-downs that smell faintly of spit-up.

If you need to upgrade your nursery without sacrificing your sanity or completely blowing your budget, go add a couple of safe, breathable essentials to your Kianao cart right now before the baby wakes up crying again. Then, for the love of everything holy, close your eyes and go to sleep.

Questions I was desperately Googling at 3 AM

Why do so many high-profile couples use surrogacy?

Honestly, I don't have a medical degree, but from what I gather, a lot of these wealthy folks turn to surrogacy because of severe health complications, age factors, or just the sheer convenience of not having to pause their careers. For regular folks like us, the cost of surrogacy is completely out of reach—it's like buying a luxury house in cash—but for them, it's just another Wednesday expense. It definitely brings up a lot of complicated feelings about wealth and family planning.

What should I really worry about with SIDS?

My doctor basically drilled into my head that the safest thing is a firm mattress with a fitted sheet and absolutely nothing else. No bumpers, no stuffed animals, no loose blankets. It feels wrong because we want to make our babies cozy like a little nest, but all that fluffy stuff is exactly what causes the danger. I still check their breathing a hundred times a night, but following the bare-minimum crib rule at least helps me sleep for twenty minutes at a time.

How do you afford multiple kids without going totally broke?

You embrace the chaos of hand-me-downs and you stop caring about aesthetics. Half of my kids' wardrobes came from a local church swap, and the other half are stained. I run my Etsy shop late at night just to afford the good diapers because the cheap ones give my youngest a terrible rash. You just figure it out month by month, budget by budget, and learn to say no to expensive toys they're just going to break anyway.

Is IVF a guarantee for twins or triplets?

Not at all, though it totally seems like it when you look at celebrity news. A friend of mine went through three brutal rounds of IVF and they only ever transferred one embryo at a time because her doctor said carrying multiples was way too risky for her body. Sometimes an embryo splits, or sometimes they transfer a couple hoping one sticks and they all do, but it's definitely not a buy-one-get-one-free guarantee.

How do I set boundaries with family posting my kid online?

You just have to be totally blunt, even if it hurts their feelings. I told my mother-in-law straight up that if she posted another bathtub photo of my toddler on Facebook, she was going to lose her photo privileges entirely. It caused a massive fight at Thanksgiving, but it's my job to protect my kids' privacy, not her ego. Blame it on the doctor or safety articles if you've to, but hold that line.