Elon Musk
Sarah Biren
Sarah Biren
July 22, 2022 ·  4 min read

Why does Elon Musk keep conceiving children with Canadians?

In late 2021, Elon Musk fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his technology company Neuralink. Musk now has nine children with three women, all Canadian. His first wife, Canadian author Justine Musk, had five children with him, a pair of twins and triplets. Musk’s sixth and seventh children were born to Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, an award-winning musician from Vancouver. Their children were famously named, X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl. Of course, Zilis is Canadian as well, although the twins were born in Texas.

Elon Musk’s Nine Children

Soon after the birth of the twins with Zilis, Grimes gave birth to her second child with Musk. When Musk confirmed the births on Twitter, he joked that he was “doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” He added, “Far too many people are under the illusion that Earth is overpopulated, even though birth rate trends are so obviously headed to population collapse.”

Elon Musk met Justine, his first wife, while attending Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. They had actually six children together, but one named Nevada Alexander died during infancy. The other five were multiples, twins, and triplets, likely due to the pregnancies occurring through IVF. After the divorce in 2010, Justine kept her ex-husband’s last name for their children’s sake. The twins, Griffin and Vivian Jenna were born less than two months after Nevada Alexander’s death. Two years later, in 2006, Kai, Saxon, and Damian came into the world.

Vivian Jenna made headlines at age 18, when she created a petition to legally change her name and gender. “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,” Vivian wrote. She now uses her mother’s maiden name, Wilson.

Around that time, Justine opened up about when she and Elon discussed having children together. At the time, he was working on his first tech startup called Zip2, which was a software program that functioned as a city guide. “One night, over dinner, he asked me how many kids I wanted to have. ‘One or two,’ I said immediately, ‘although if I could afford nannies, I’d like to have four,’” she wrote. Musk said he assumed there would be nannies and “made a rocking motion with his arms and said, happily, ‘Baby.’” [1]

Read: Bill Gates Says he Fully Intends to Lose his Rich List Spot While Still Alive

X Æ A-Xiiwas and Exa Dark Sideræl

Elon Musk’s children with Grimes went viral because of their unusual names. X Æ A-Xiiwas born in May 2020 and was named after the Lockheed A-12, an aircraft from the 1960s, one of the fastest planes in existence. Exa Dark Sideræl was born via surrogate in December 2021, soon after Zilis’s twins were born. Grimes only announced Exa’s birth during an interview with Vanity Fair. During the conversation, the reporter heard a baby crying upstairs, so Grimes hesitantly spoke about her second child with Musk. “She’s a little colicky too,” she added. 

About the name, Grimes explained that “Exa” refers to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS. Her middle name “Dark” refers to “the unknown” which people fear but it’s just an absence of light; plus, dark matter is a beautiful mystery in our universe. “Sideræl” has two meanings: It’s a “more elven” version of sidereal. “The true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time”. It’s also a references to Galadriel, Grimes favorite character from Lord of the Rings. [2]

Shivon Zilis’s twins’ names and genders were kept hidden from the public. However, legal papers show a request to a Texan court to change the baby’s names so they could “have their father’s last name and contain their mother’s last name as part of their middle name.” The names were redacted from these papers. [3]

I love Canada!

While Elon Musk has had children with only Canadian women, he has dated and married non-Canadian women. For instance, he has married English actress Talulah Riley — twice, with their second divorce in 2016. He also briefly dated American actress Amber Heard soon after she had divorced actor Johnny Depp. Musk himself has a Canadian citizenship; after all, his mother, Maye Musk, was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, where Elon spent summers as a teenager.

Keep Reading: Elon Musk Wonders Whether TikTok Is Destroying Civilization

Sources

  1. “Why does Elon Musk keep conceiving children with Canadians?National Post. Tristin Hopper. July 12, 2022
  2. “Elon Musk, Grimes name second child Exa Dark Sideræl. Check out what it means.” Business Today. March 11, 2022
  3. “Everything to Know About Elon Musk’s Family (He’s a Dad of 10).People. Skyler Caruso. July 7, 2022.