Elon Musk's Dark Side: Dangerous Views and Women as Interchangeable Pets

Elon Musk stands as the richest person on Earth and arguably the most powerful figure alive today. He grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, as the son of a model mother and an electromechanical engineer father. His journey took him to the University of Pennsylvania and then Stanford, where his legendary tech career truly began.

Yet whispers from those closest to him paint a darker picture. One former partner describes him not just as ambitious but dangerous. The allegations swirl around his massive wealth and his strange worldview. Some claim he treats reality like a simulation where humans are merely pets kept by machines. He reportedly shared this view with Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian computer scientist who warned about AI risks.

Justine Wilson, his first wife, bore him six children before their split. She says she feels interchangeable to him. 'I feel like we [women] are pretty much interchangeable to him,' she states. 'I heard that he refers to us as "the breeders".' Her words suggest a cold calculation behind his family life.

Ashley St Clair, a former girlfriend who had a son named Romulus in September 2024, offers another chilling account. She says Musk told her he wanted a legion of children before an inevitable civil war. 'He told me that he wanted to create a legion of children before the civil war,' she recalls. She claims he sent direct messages offering to father kids with right-wing young women. To her, it looked like a Gatling gun of sperm firing across his inbox.

The documentary Musk, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival yesterday, brings these claims into sharp focus. It runs almost four hours and presents startling assertions about his business practices too. The film alleges he told incredible lies to pump up stock prices. One major fiction involved his self-driving cars supposedly operating without driver oversight. This deception allegedly led to around 60 deaths and a flood of lawsuits in the United States.

Another accusation targets his Mars colonization plans. Critics say those goals have been imminent for about a decade yet remain unfulfilled. He started at Stanford, which helped build him into a multibillionaire and even a brief trillionaire in June. But did he sell a dream that never fully materialized?

A classic con involved battery swaps in 2013. Tesla owners were told they could swap charged packs faster than filling a gas tank. The firm banked $11 billion, or about £8 billion, in California carbon credits because of this promise. In reality, the capability was never widespread enough to match public claims. Author Cory Doctorow describes the marketing as 'like showing someone a roll of singles with a single $100 bill on top.'

World domination via Starlink satellites is another alleged plot. There are currently around 11,000 satellites in orbit controlling global internet access. The documentary suggests Musk may have harvested data on American citizens during the DOGE era. 'It's going to use this data to corrupt the forthcoming mid-term elections,' the film claims.

DOGE was his brief stint in President Donald Trump's inner circle running the Department of Government Efficiency. They promised to cut $2 trillion, or roughly £1.5 trillion, from the federal budget. That endeavor ended as a toothless failure despite some staff cuts and reductions in foreign aid. The US national deficit remained untouched. Musk quit after four months, declaring the government was 'unfixable'.

The film puts his time at DOGE under heavy scrutiny too. Why would a man with such resources join a failing administrative experiment? And what does he hope to gain from controlling information networks across the globe? These questions linger as new evidence surfaces about his true intentions.

St Clair, the 28-year-old author who met Elon Musk on X before becoming his child's mother, claims she watched him leave Mar-a-Lago well before election night results came in. She told filmmakers that Musk was curiously certain Trump would win. 'He said: "I knew it [the result] hours ago." The degree of certainty he had, I had never seen before,' she says.

The documentary also examines his purchase of Twitter, now X, back in 2022 which promptly lost 80 per cent of its value. Scrutiny falls on Musk's brief time at DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency – too. He was said to have been 'freaking out' about the film before it screened in Venice. Indeed during yesterday's press conference St Clair claimed he offered her $40 million not to take part. Musk declined to be included and his response afterwards, posted on X, was simply 'LMFAO'.

He may claim to find the scrutiny hilarious, but the talking heads in the film believe he is dangerous. These include his first wife, a number of ex-friends, and a one-time colleague at NASA. They argue he might be the most dangerous man in the world as well as the richest. One early casualty of Musk's brutal attitude towards the human condition is Justine, his first wife whom he married in 2000. She recalls: 'As we danced at our wedding Elon told me: "I am the Alpha in this relationship." He was constantly reminding me that I was lacking. He said to me if you were my employee then I would fire you.'

Two years into their eight-year marriage, their first-born son Nevada Alexander died of sudden infant death syndrome when he was just ten weeks. In a tweet, Musk said he held him in his arms as he died and felt his last heartbeat. But in the film, Justine says she was holding Nevada at the time, at the hospital. She went on to have twins by IVF and then triplets, yet the happy family she longed for never materialised. 'There was a sense of distance and, to be honest, a sense of contempt on Elon's part.'

'It was war peace war peace. I learned of the term gaslighting in my relationship with Elon.' Within a month of their separation in 2008, he married little-known British actress Talulah Riley – then 25 to his 41 – whom he divorced, married again, and then divorced again. They did not have children. He then struck up a relationship with 30-year-old Canadian singer Grimes, real name Claire Boucher.

The liaison started with flirty, pseudo-intellectual tweets and the couple made their public debut at the Met Gala Ball in New York in May 2018. Son X arrived in 2020. At the time, Grimes called her lover 'a super goddam interesting person'. But there were inklings of Musk's transformation that year, as he declared that 'pronouns suck' and the word 'cis' – meaning someone whose gender identity matches their biological sex – was a 'slur'.

Grimes was appalled, and wrote: 'I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn't your heart.' But it was. Musk started to espouse some seriously controversial views. One former friend says that the combination of the Covid pandemic and Musk's 'addiction' to his popularity on X changed him as a person. In the film author and neuroscientist Sam Harris says: 'He started to behave in ways that were incomprehensible to me.' Tech journalist Kara Swisher says: 'He thinks he is just a higher being.'

In December 2020, Musk moved to Texas and opened a huge Tesla factory in Austin. The film suggests this move marked another chapter in his evolving story.

Fifty million dollars flowed into television ads supporting Citizens for Sanity, a right-wing group fighting against progressive ideas. Meanwhile, Elon Musk blamed the so-called woke mind virus for his son Xavier's decision to live as Jenna at eighteen after leaving his first marriage. His ex-wife Justine described the pain of watching her daughter suffer and accused him of never trying to fix things when their relationship broke. She claims he told her to tell Jenna how much he loved her, only to cut off her health insurance the very next day.

Complications mounted quickly as Shivon Zilis, an operations director at Neuralink, had twins with Musk via surrogacy in November 2021. This happened just one month before his daughter Exa Dark Siderael was born through a similar arrangement. Musk posted on Twitter that helping the underpopulation crisis mattered because collapsing birth rates threaten civilization more than anything else. Though Grimes and Musk were officially broken up, their relationship stayed fluid for a while. In April 2022, during an off period, Grimes filed a petition to determine parental rights with him after learning the other mother had children too.

She only found out about Shivon Zilis's twins from a Business Insider report and pleaded publicly for access to X after seeing a photo of Musk with them. Within weeks of Techno Mechanicus being born in June 2022, Musk sued Grimes to establish parent-child relationships because she kept the youngest two kids in California while he stayed in Texas. He retained custody of their son X while suing for joint or primary custody over all three children. At an August 2024 hearing, Musk stated the kids were settled in Austin and attending local schools there.

St Clair told the documentary that she saw concerning interactions between Elon and Claire regarding little X. She watched him block her texts as she pleaded about the situation before he took the baby from her. After Romulus was born, she said their romance ended completely despite his initial kindness. Her fixer Jared Birchall tried to strike a deal involving a child support agreement that included clauses silencing her from speaking about him. The offer included fifteen million dollars upfront plus one hundred thousand dollars monthly.

Birchall told St Clair that other mothers had signed similar deals but did not seem happy with the terms. He argued that a drugged-out musician could not find true happiness while Shivon went in and out of contentment. Birchall claimed Elon is kind and generous but noted that when a trusted mother goes legal, it always leads to worse outcomes for women involved. St Clair refused to sign the agreement and her payments dropped from one hundred thousand to forty thousand dollars before falling again to twenty thousand.

She was intelligent and successful," she says now when talking about Musk, "but he was definitely strange." One time they were together, and he fell asleep with a podcast playing about Kublai Khan. Legend says this 13th-century Mongol emperor and grandson of Genghis Khan had 47 sons. Sam Harris, the Right-leaning podcaster and former friend of Musk, adds: "We are living in a world where one person's psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequence in our politics, in our economy, in our geopolitics." It feels completely insane to have just one chaotic individual who remains unelected yet holds this much power. Alex Gibney, the filmmaker behind the documentary, agrees with that view. "People assume because he's very rich that he's not crazy," he states. But the terrifying thing might be exactly that: he is crazy and he is very rich and powerful. That is the warning bell the film sounds.