kids

Elon Musk has reportedly 'welcomed' twins with one of his execs. He now has 9 children.

Elon Musk is one of the richest people in the world.

The 51-year-old SpaceX founder and Tesla magnate has joined the likes of Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Microsoft's Bill Gates to become one of only five 'centibillionaires' – someone with a personal fortune exceeding $100 billion – in the world.

But it hasn't always been smooth sailing for the controversial figure, especially after it was revealed this week that the billionaire had allegedly 'secretly welcomed' twins just a few weeks before he and his former partner Grimes had their second child via surrogate.

Watch a clip from Elon Musk's opening monologue on Saturday Night Live below. Post continues after video.


Video via NBC.

Here is everything we know about the Tesla magnate. 

Early days.

Born to model Maye Musk and electromechanical engineer Errol Musk, Elon Musk was raised in Pretoria, South Africa, alongside his younger brother, Kimbal, and younger sister, Tosca. 

When Maye and Errol later divorced in 1980, Musk opted to move in with his father, who seemed "lonely". But soon afterwards, he realised it was "not a good idea".

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"He was such a terrible human being. You have no idea," Musk told Rolling Stone.

"You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done."

In recent years, Musk has refrained from speaking about his estranged father. (Errol Musk famously made headlines in 2018 after he welcomed a baby with his stepdaughter, who is 40 years his junior.)

But in Ashlee Vance’s 2015 biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Musk described his childhood as "like misery".

"[My father] is good at making life miserable – that’s for sure. He’s not a happy man," he said. "I don’t know how someone becomes like he is. It would just cause too much trouble to tell you any more."

Outside of family dramas, Musk had a tough time at school.

Elon Musk in 2004. Image: Getty. 

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Throughout his childhood, he was severely bullied, and even hospitalised following one incident when a group of boys threw him down a flight of stairs.

"It's pretty rough in South Africa," Musk's brother, Kimbal, told Esquire

"Kids gave Elon a very hard time, and it had a huge impact on his life. In South Africa, if you're getting bullied, you still have to go to school. You just have to get up in the morning and go. He hated it so much."

But while school was challenging, Musk found an escape in the form of computers as well as his growing desire to move to the United States, which he saw as the land of endless opportunity.

Musk's rise to billionaire status.

After graduating high school, Musk moved to Canada to study at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he later graduated with degrees in economics and physics.

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Although Musk was later accepted to a PhD program at Stanford University in California, Musk dropped out of Stanford after just two days, opting to dip his toe into the world of Silicon Valley.

Partnered with his brother Kimbal, Musk founded a software company, Zip2, which provided online city guide software to newspaper publishers. However, at the time, the brothers could not afford an apartment in California. Instead, they slept on the office couch, and showered at a nearby YMCA.

"The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time," Musk shared in a speech in 2014.

"I briefly had a girlfriend in that period and in order to be with me she’d have to sleep in the office."

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But eventually, it paid off. Four years after the company was founded, Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million, with Musk receiving $22 million for his share in the company.

Since the launch of Zip2 in 1995, Musk's career – and net worth – has grown astronomically.

In 1999, he co-founded online bank X.com, which later merged with Confinity to form PayPal, before being bought by eBay for $1.5 billion.

After eBay's purchase of PayPal earned Musk $165 million, the tech mogul founded SpaceX, joined Tesla, and helped create SolarCity, a solar energy services company.

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But by 2008, Musk was almost broke. Amid the global financial crisis and struggles within both SpaceX and Tesla, Musk was living off personal loans.

"[2008] was definitely the worst year of my life," he later told 60 Minutes.

"I remember waking up the Sunday before Christmas in 2008 and thinking to myself, 'Man, I never thought I was someone who could ever be capable of a nervous breakdown. I felt this is the closest I've ever come. Because it seemed pretty, pretty dark."

Elon Musk in 2008. Image: Getty. 

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Family life.

At that same time, Musk's personal life was in shambles.

In 2008, Musk divorced his wife of eight years, Canadian author Justine Wilson. During their marriage, the couple had twins and triplets together. Their first son, Nevada, died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) at 10 weeks old.

In 2022, one of the twins, Vivian, filed a request to change her name due to "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".

In an infamous piece for Marie Claire, Wilson wrote: "One month and three [counselling] sessions later, he gave me an ultimatum: 'Either we fix this marriage today or I will ­divorce you tomorrow.' He filed for divorce the next morning."

She added: "Six weeks [after Musk filed for divorce], he texted me to say he was engaged to a gorgeous British actress in her early 20s who had moved to Los Angeles to be with him."

Musk later married British actress, Talulah Riley, in 2010.

Speaking to the Evening Standard, Riley shared that she met Musk at a London nightclub.

"He showed me all these pictures on his phone: 'This is my rocket, this is my electric car.' I did think he was a little bit insane," she said.

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They later divorced in 2012, before remarrying in 2013, and then divorcing once again in 2016.

Talulah Riley and Elon Musk in 2014. Image: Getty. 

Amid the couple's second divorce, Musk was linked to actress Amber Heard, who he had reportedly been pursuing since 2012. However, their relationship didn't last long.

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"I was really in love, and it hurt bad," Musk later told Rolling Stone, reflecting on his split from Heard.

Amber Heard in 2020. Image: Getty. 

As for his career, things started slowly looking up for Musk after SpaceX landed a $1.5 billion contract with NASA, while Tesla continued to grow. In fact, Musk's rapid career growth served as inspiration for Robert Downey Jr's portrayal of Tony Stark in Marvel's Iron Man. 

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In the years that followed, Musk founded several new companies, including OpenAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. 

But since Musk's business portfolio and social media presence have grown, he has faced his fair share of controversies.

The now 51-year-old faced significant backlash after joining Donald Trump's business advisory council. (Musk later quit the role after Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement on climate change.)

Then, in 2018, Musk was criticised after he referred to British diver Vernon Unsworth as a "pedo guy" following his involvement in the Tham Lung cave rescue of a children's soccer team in Thailand. Although Unsworth filed a defamation lawsuit against Musk, the SpaceX founder was found not guilty of defaming the diver.

More recently, Musk has faced controversy for consistently spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, including claiming that death statistics were manipulated and tweeting misinformation about COVID-19 testing.

The 51-year-old also made news for buying Twitter Inc for $44 billion cash (AUD$61 billion) in a transaction that will give him control of the social media platform.

The transaction was approved by the board and is now subject to a shareholder vote.

Amid the controversies, Musk began dating Canadian musician Grimes, also known as Claire Boucher, in 2018.

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In 2019, Grimes announced her pregnancy, confirming that Musk was the father.

Their son, who was born in May 2020, was named "X Æ A-12". But after the name was deemed illegal under California law, his name was eventually changed to "X AE A-XII". The couple often refer to their son as "X".

 Elon Musk and Grimes at the Met Gala in 2018. Image: Getty. 

In September 2021, Musk told Page Six that he and Grimes are 'semi-separated', but continue to co-parent together.

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"We are semi-separated but still love each other, see each other frequently and are on great terms," he said.

"It's mostly that my work at SpaceX and Tesla requires me to be primarily in Texas or travelling overseas and her work is primarily in LA.

"She's staying with me now and Baby X is in the adjacent room."

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Grimes shared that she and Musk welcomed a second child, Exa Dark Sideræl, in December 2021.

During the in-person sit-down at Grimes' new home in Austin, Texas, the Vanity Fair reporter heard baby cries coming from upstairs. 

Grimes had previously shared that Baby X was with his father.

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In a new report by Business Insider in 2022, Musk allegedly welcomed newborn twins just weeks before the arrival of his second child with Grimes. 

The mother of the twins is reportedly a top executive at Neuralink, named Shivon Zilis.

The Neuralink Corporation is a neurotechnology company which develops implantable brain-machine interfaces and it was co-founded by Musk in 2016.

According to the report, court documents were obtained and revealed that Musk and Zilis had filed a petition to change the twins’ names in order to “have their father’s last name and contain their mother’s last name as part of their middle name”. 

Musk’s two kids with Grimes and his alleged twins with Zilis join his five other children: Griffin, Vivian Jenna, Kai, Saxon, and Damian.

As for Grimes' relationship with Musk in 2022, she said they're "happy".

"There’s no real word for it," Grimes said.

"I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid. We live in separate houses. We’re best friends. We see each other all the time... we just have our own thing going on, and I don’t expect other people to understand it."

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"This is the best it’s ever been... we just need to be free." 

They both want more children, too: "We’ve always wanted at least three or four."

The musician shared that after a "scary" pregnancy with their first child, the couple feared serious complications. So, they welcomed their daughter via surrogate. 

She goes by the nickname "Y".

Grimes later explained the meaning of her daughter's name, Exa Dark Sideræl.

"Exa is a reference to the super-computing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform one quintillion floating-point operations per second). Dark, meanwhile, is the unknown. People fear it but truly it's the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe."

Grimes explained Sideræl is pronounced "sigh-deer-ee-el", and it's "the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time".

It's also a nod to her favourite Lord of the Rings character, Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the ring". 

This post was originally published on May 11, 2021, and has been updated with new information.

Feature Image: Getty.