Back in 2022, Business Insider reported that Elon Musk had secretly fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at one of his companies. “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” he tweeted at the time. “Mark my words, they are sadly true.” An obsession with procreating aside, the news was fairly surprising at the time—not only because it brought Musk’s offspring headcount to near-double digits but because Zilis was one of his own employees, which is generally considered a no-no in the modern-day workplace. Yet, as it turns out, Zilis wasn’t even the first employee Musk proposed reproducing with.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, in a long story about Musk’s “boundary-blurring relationships with women at SpaceX,” that in 2013, a woman who directly reported to the billionaire “alleged that Musk had asked her on multiple occasions to have his babies, according to people familiar with the allegations.” In contrast to Zilis, who took Musk up on his proposal after he reportedly offered his sperm to her, the other woman declined, and apparently had to do so more than once. After this, according to the Journal, she continued to work for SpaceX but the relationship with Musk “deteriorated.” In addition to the baby business, people familiar with the matter also told the Journal that Musk “denied the woman a raise and complained about her performance.” She later left the company with a cash and stock exit package worth more than $1 million, according to the report.
Allegedly asking someone in his employ to bear his children is not the only bit of inappropriateness the Journal alleged in its story. There was also this:
In affidavits signed by the woman and provided to the Journal by her lawyers—who also happen to represent Musk—the woman claimed that there was no “romantic relationship” with the SpaceX CEO while she was employed from 2017 to 2019, though she confirmed they’d had a romantic relationship in the past.
In 2022, Business Insider reported that Musk allegedly exposed himself to a SpaceX flight attendant and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for sex acts. She reportedly said no, and the company allegedly reduced her shifts. According to Insider, SpaceX eventually agreed to paid the woman $250,000. Musk called the claims “utterly untrue“ and proposed the scandal be dubbed “Elongate.”
In an equally bizarre anecdote, the Journal also reported this week that a SpaceX employee who worked for both Musk and Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president, was accused by Shotwell of having an affair with the exec’s husband after helping plan a surprise birthday party for her. Afterwards, Shotwell reportedly tried to push the woman out—and then Musk “initiated a sexual relationship with the woman, who by that time was working directly for him alone,” the woman reportedly told people close to her.