But now his time in the White House is drawing to a close, and Musk has announced that from now on, he will be spending more time with his businesses (including Tesla, SpaceX and the social network X). Not, you’ll notice, the traditional retiring politician’s promise to “spend more time with his family” — which in Musk’s case would be tricky, given that he doesn’t have anything like a traditional family.

In Fight Club, the narrator complains to Tyler Durden about having an absent father: “Every six years, he goes to a new city and starts a new family.” Durden responds: “Fucker’s setting up franchises.” And “setting up franchises” essentially describes Musk’s attitude to fatherhood. He’s known to have at least 14 children with four women, although according to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, it’s probable that the actual number is far higher.

Of course, Musk doesn’t use the word “franchise” — he prefers the military metaphor of having a “legion” of children. The mothers of his many children, meanwhile, use another word: “harem”. They talk about being dragged into “harem drama”, as Musk plays favorites and uses his financial power to punish or reward. After one of the babymamas pushed back against a gagging clause that would have prevented her from speaking negatively about him (but not the other way around), he cut her monthly stipend from $100,000 to $40,000.

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Which all suggests that Musk has a pretty terrible attitude to women: they’re there to procreate and to take orders. With one exception: his mother Maye Musk enjoys a privileged role in the court of Musk. She has an apparently close and protective relationship with her son: after the WSJ article was published, she responded to the allegations about the treatment of her grandchildren by calling it “dishonest” and flagging the journalists who wrote it to an X account called “@Ifindretards”.

Musk reportedly uses privacy deals to stop the mothers of his children from publicly associating themselves (or their children) with him. Meanwhile, Maye socializes with the wives and daughters of the Republican elite: a seat next to Melania at a Mar-a-Lago dinner party, a luncheon with Ivanka, a ride on Air Force One. She’s the nearest thing Musk has to a first lady.

She’s also apparently free to capitalize on her family as much as she likes. Maye would, presumably, disagree with the idea that she owes her status to her son. She has her own profile as a model — now 77, she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue in 2022. She is, incongruously, especially popular in China, where she’s regarded as a “silver influencer” and is in demand for lucrative partnerships with local brands.

She has, inevitably, written a book, which promises “Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success.” And, equally inevitably, she also offers a self-help course where you can learn her “five rules for life”. It is silly to think that anyone would be fascinated by this if Maye wasn’t the mother of the richest man in the world, but it’s equally silly to assume the benefit only goes one way. Maye lends Musk something that he could never have without her: humanity. Without her, it would be impossible to think of Musk — with his collection of children, his nativist fixations and his obsession with the letter X — as anything other than alarmingly weird. Maye brings a softening lifestyle angle to the dynasty: think of her as “GoopX”.

She even has a backstory that recasts Musk, with all his (kindly) eccentricities, as an object of sympathy. According to her autobiography, she left Musk’s father Errol because he was abusive (Errol denies this). The backstory to the backstory, however, is less helpful: Maye’s father Joshua N Haldeman, who died when Musk was two, was a white supremacist and antisemite who opposed democracy and believed there was a “a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of White Christian Civilization”. 

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Racism is not a hereditary trait (even though it would be funny if it was), and the fact that Haldeman held those opinions tells you little about his descendants. But it’s a useful reminder that the Musk family tree has been political for several generations, and Maye is a political player in her own right. As Wired reported, she’s used her social media posts to support Musk’s lobbying efforts on behalf of his businesses in China, and her own visits to the country (she claims to go almost every month) have been celebrated by members of the Chinese government. 

Until her son’s embrace of Trump 2.0, Maye’s American presence was non-partisan — at her most firebrand, she was the kind of girlboss Democrat who went to Hilary Clinton fundraisers. But as her son’s ambitions converged on Trump, so did her posting. Increasingly, she used her accounts to boost Musk’s interests, which meant boosting Trump. (If she’s sore about Trump’s tariff war potentially affecting her relationship with China, it hasn’t affected her loyalty.)

Musk loves a classical reference, so here’s a new one for him to enjoy. If his children are his “legion”, then Maye is the Livia to his Tiberius, in the style of Siân Phillips in I, Claudius. She is the savvy operator who can make up for his deficiencies, the proxy who can act on his behalf while pretending all to be doing nothing more than “mothering”. She can be his attack dog, and call it maternal instinct — though it’s notable that she doesn’t post about her other two children nearly as often. 

A power mother is a great asset (just ask the Kardashians). That’s true both publicly and privately. Maye is the one who is allowed to speak truth to her son’s power: she told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that “the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father”, and grows absorbed with conspiracies and delusions of grandeur. Whether he listens to her is another thing, but at least he didn’t fall out with her — which is what happened to Sam Harris when he demurred from the Musk line on covid. Naughty boys listen to their mothers.

But for Musk, Maye is also a bit of a reputational liability. Musk believes intensely in masculinity: “Men are made for war. Real men, anyway,” he texted to one of the mothers of his children. He has used his enormous riches to create a private world where women are maximally disposable, to be purchased for their reproductive value and maintained at a safe distance.

Meanwhile, Maye is out there telling people to “stop being mean” to her son, as though he were a weedy kid being bullied in the playground and not a billionaire who until recently had the power to direct the US budget. Men might be made for war, but Maye Musk is perfectly capable of fighting her son’s corner. Musk seems to be long beyond relying on women, but really he’s the ultimate mama’s boy.