Despite Being Worth Billions, Elon Musk Refused To Raise Spoiled Kids
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NewsTranscript
00:00Elon Musk is worth more than any human being in history, yet his 14 children hold no shares in
00:06Tesla, none in SpaceX, and one of them says she was cut off at 18. He calls that good parenting
00:13and the perfect way to raise kids that are not spoiled. But the part Elon leaves out is the
00:19part nobody ever checked, the fortune that stops at his front door. Elon Musk spent the first half
00:25of 2026 becoming the richest person who has ever drawn breath. SpaceX went public in June of that
00:32year, and the coverage that followed described him as the world's first paper trillionaire.
00:38The filings that made it possible tell you something the headlines skipped.
00:42Musk and company insiders kept voting control of SpaceX after the listing, and the prospectus
00:48left him holding roughly 85 percent of shareholder votes. Through Class B supervoting shares worth 10
00:55votes each. Ordinary Class A shares get one vote. The public bought the company and he kept the
01:02steering wheel. The question that started all of this came from Thorold Barker, an editor at the
01:07Wall Street Journal at the paper's CEO Council Summit in London on the 23rd of May 2023. Musk joined by
01:16Videolink from Palo Alto. For an hour they talked about Twitter, artificial intelligence, Mars and China.
01:23Then Barker asked about the one thing every billionaire eventually has to answer for.
01:29He wanted the succession plan, and he split it into two halves, the question of who runs the companies
01:34if Musk suddenly cannot and the more important question of who votes those shares. Musk called
01:41succession one of the toughest age-old problems. The kind that has troubled kings, prime ministers and
01:47chief executives since the dawn of history, with no obvious solution, then came the part of the answer
01:53that has almost never been quoted, the part about the people he has already picked. There are particular
01:59individuals identified. He told the room, and every board has been given the same instruction,
02:06that if something happens to him unexpectedly, this is his recommendation for taking over. He was careful
02:12to say the boards can ignore him completely, and that the recommendation sits there as a worst-case
02:17note. Then he moved to the harder half, the question of who actually votes the shares. He said the
02:23companies he built collectively possess immense capability, and that their stewardship should accrue
02:28to the benefit of humanity and the furtherance of civilization. So he floated an idea and described
02:35it as something already partly in place. The plan he sketched was an educational institution that would
02:41control most of his vote. And he stumbled over that sentence twice while saying it out loud,
02:47a school holding the votes of Tesla and SpaceX. That is the setup for the sentence that ended up on
02:53thumbnails around the world. Because right after floating it, he explained exactly what he was
02:58ruling out. He is not of the school of automatically giving his kids some share of the companies.
03:04He said, and handing a child one, even if they have no interest or inclination or ability to manage the
03:11business, is, in his own word, a mistake. There is one word in that answer doing almost all the work,
03:18and it is the word automatically. His rule covers shares handed over purely because of bloodline,
03:24with no interest and no ability attached. A son or daughter who wanted the job and could do it,
03:31went unmentioned on that stage. So that door was left standing open. He also admitted on the same stage
03:37that he was working it out live. Some disaggregation of control would probably make sense,
03:43he offered, before adding that he was really just thinking out loud creatively.
03:48Three years later, nothing about that school has appeared anywhere you could check. No public
03:53filing places Tesla or SpaceX votes inside an educational institution. The Musk Foundation has
04:00funded school projects in Texas, which is a long way from a voting trust over two of the largest
04:07companies on Earth. Meanwhile, the votes went the other way. In June of 2026, he exercised his 2018
04:14Tesla Option Award into restricted stock. He can vote immediately, close to 20% of the company,
04:21on the way to the 25% he says he wants. The headlines that ran after the SpaceX listing,
04:27the ones announcing that the trillionaire would not leave his fortune to his 14 children,
04:32were not built on any new interview. They were the 2023 clip with a fresh net worth figure stapled to
04:39the front. Several outlets even placed the CEO Council in New York that week. It was London,
04:45and it was three years earlier. So what does the money actually do if it does not turn into inheritance?
04:52It buys addresses. In October of 2024, the New York Times reported that Musk had bought adjoining Austin
05:00properties, totaling about $35 million, so his younger children and two of their mothers could
05:06live near one another. Shivan Zilis, the Neuralink executive who has had four children with him,
05:12moved into one of the homes, and he keeps a third house nearby with extra security when he is in
05:17town.
05:18Testifying in 2026, Zilis said they live together when traveling and that he is in part supporting the
05:25children. The older household had its own price tag, and Musk published it himself. In 2010,
05:32writing an open letter about his divorce, he set out the arrangement with his first wife,
05:37Justine Wilson. On top of paying all of her household expenses and anything related to the children,
05:43he sent her $20,000 a month after tax for clothing, shoes, and other discretionary items.
05:50She kept the family home in Bel Air, and the settlement came to roughly $20 million after
05:55tax. She had asked for 10% of Tesla and 5% of SpaceX. A post-nuptial agreement held,
06:03and Forbes later put her whole net worth somewhere around $15 million, about 124 thousandth of his
06:10fortune at the time. Count the people that fortune is supposed to be stopping short of,
06:15and the arithmetic gets strange fast. There are 14 publicly documented children across four mothers,
06:22and 13 are living. Justine had six. The first Nevada Alexander died of sudden infant
06:29death syndrome at 10 weeks old in 2002. The twins Griffin and Vivian followed in 2004,
06:36and the triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian in 2006. Grimes had three, named X, Exa and Techno Mechanicus.
06:46Shivanzilis had four, starting with the twins Strider and Azure in 2021. Then Arcadia. Then a boy called
06:54Selden Lycurgus, who was announced on Arcadia's first birthday. Ashley St. Clair had one,
07:00a boy named Romulus. The Wall Street Journal has reported that people close to Musk believe the
07:06real number is higher than 14, which is sourcing rather than a confirmed extra name. Then look at
07:13what any of them can actually reach, and the record goes quiet. Griffin appeared beside his father at
07:19the Vatican in 2022, and at a Miami event in 2024, then went silent. The triplets have never given an
07:28interview. Fan sites hand the older sons jobs at Tesla and SpaceX with net worths attached, and there
07:36is no primary source under a single one of those numbers. Nannies, compounds, security details,
07:42Bel Air. Not one confirmed share of Tesla, SpaceX, X or XAI has ever been granted to any of the
07:5014.
07:51No public filing shows a large funded trust for a single one of them. And yet there is one moment
07:56on
07:57the record that cuts straight across the whole policy. In the 2026 trial between Musk and Sam
08:03Altman, Altman testified that during the founding of OpenAI, Musk was asked what happens to control
08:10if he dies, and answered that maybe it should pass to his children. Altman called the thought hair
08:15raising. That was the instinct before the doctrine. The doctrine itself started in a rented office in
08:22Palo Alto with a futon on the floor. The school he built on a rocket factory floor. Elon Musk explained
08:30his entire parenting philosophy in a single post on the 3rd of May 2022. And he did it while arguing
08:37with a stranger online. Somebody had asked why. If rich parents explain success, so many wealthy kids go
08:44to art school and never work. His reply became the foundation of every article written about him as a
08:50father since. And he wrote that kids, starting with lots of money, usually have much less motivation
08:56than those who have nothing. And that when he started Zip2 in 95, he had over $100,000 of student
09:04debt,
09:04a computer he built himself and a few thousand dollars. He had been telling that same story on camera
09:10nearly 20 years earlier, back when nobody outside Silicon Valley knew his name. He had no money in those
09:17days. He had negative money, carrying huge student debts, and he could not afford a place to stay
09:24and an office at the same time. The solution he found was to skip the apartment entirely. He rented
09:31an office instead because an office in Palo Alto was cheaper than somewhere to sleep. And then he made
09:36the office do both jobs. His brother Kimball came down from Canada. A friend of their mother joined them.
09:42Three salespeople were hired on contingency through a newspaper advert. There were six of them in total,
09:48and half the people they pitched had no idea what the internet even was. He slept on a futon on
09:54the
09:54office floor and showered at the YMCA on Page Mill and El Camino. And he has said it left him
10:00in the
10:01best shape he has ever been in, since the routine each morning was a shower, a workout, and straight back
10:07upstairs to work. They drilled a hole through the floor to reach the tiny internet provider downstairs
10:14and ran a cable through it, which gave them connectivity for around $100 a month. The burn
10:20rate was almost nothing. The revenue was slightly larger, so when they sat in front of venture capitalists,
10:26they could say the words positive cash flow. Zip2 sold to Compaq four years later for about $307
10:34million. His share was roughly $22 million, and most of it went straight into the company that became
10:40PayPal. In 2014, he turned that distrust into a building. He pulled his five older children out of
10:47the Merman School, a gifted private school in Bel Air, telling Beijing Television that it was not doing
10:53the things he thought should be done. Then he hired their teacher, a former Teach for America instructor,
10:59named Josh Dawn, and opened a school of his own inside the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne. He called it
11:06Ad Astra. The Washington Post would later describe it as possibly the most exclusive school in the world.
11:13In the first year, the five Musk children made up close to half of the entire student body. The rest
11:19of
11:19the seats went mostly to the children of SpaceX employees, and there was no tuition. The total roll is
11:26usually put somewhere around 40 to 50, a village primary school sitting inside a factory that
11:32builds orbital rockets. What they studied was stranger than where they studied. Everything ran
11:38on first principles and team projects. There was heavy science, mathematics and engineering,
11:44mixed with ethics and artificial intelligence. Students worked through short open-ended moral
11:49puzzles called conundrums, which later reached millions of classrooms through ClassDojo. One module,
11:56named Geneva, had teams argue over who should regulate artificial intelligence. They coded in Scheme,
12:03Swift and Scratch, pulled lessons from Codecademy, EDX and Khan Academy, spent an internal currency called
12:11the Astra and sat no traditional grades at all. There were no sports, no music program and no foreign
12:17languages, because Musk believed real-time translation would make learning languages pointless. Years later,
12:24his daughter Vivian described one of her classes to the streamer Hassan Piker and said it was literally
12:29Excel, which she called insane and also one of the more fun classes, because the bar was low. Filings
12:37later showed that Musk and Don split the school's intellectual property 50-50. Even here, in a classroom built for
12:45his own children, there was a rights agreement. The children left Ad Astra at around 14 and were sent
12:51into ordinary schools. Vivian went to Crossroads in Santa Monica. Musk told his biographer Walter Isaacson
12:59that he had thought they should be introduced to the real world for high school, and then admitted that
13:04what he should have done was extend Ad Astra all the way through. The Hawthorne site closed in June of
13:102020,
13:112020. Once that group of kids had moved on, the brand outlived the building. The team launched an
13:18online school called Astra Nova for students aged roughly 11 to 18, and Musk moved about 1.4 million
13:26dollars of the old Ad Astra assets into it in August of 2021. A class spun out into a company
13:33called
13:34Synthesis. Then the name returned in Texas, on land near his boring company and SpaceX operations in
13:41Bastrop, run through his family office, with thousands of families applying for around 50 seats.
13:47It was licensed by Texas health authorities as a child care operation in November of 2024.
13:53By the end of 2025, the New York Times found that the white-columned house was running as a licensed
14:00program for about 10 children aged five and under, with sleep cots and graham crackers, rather than the
14:07full elementary school that had been advertised. His views on school never softened. In April of 2024,
14:13he posted that raising a kid is basically 18 years of prompt engineering. And in the same thread,
14:19an expectant father asked for his single biggest piece of advice, so he said to be super careful about
14:25what schools teach your kids. Three years earlier on Clubhouse, he gave a blunter account of how his own
14:31children were learning, saying they were mostly educated by YouTube and Reddit. All of it traces
14:37back to a house in Pretoria with no pocket money in it. May Musk told The Telegraph in September of
14:432026 that she never gave Elon Kimball or Tosca pocket money, and they had to look after themselves.
14:50They were eight, seven, and five when she left their father in 1979, and she walked away asking for
14:57nothing except them. Then, in 2023, a TV reporter asked him what he actually tells his own children
15:05about their futures, and the answer had nothing to do with money at all. He called it a tough question,
15:11sat with it for a long moment, and then said he would tell them to follow their heart toward whatever
15:17they find interesting or fulfilling to do, and to try to be as useful as possible to the rest of
15:22society.
15:23Useful is the word carrying the weight there, and it runs into the thing that worries him more than
15:29any trust fund could, a world where being useful stops meaning anything. He asked how a person finds
15:36meaning in life once artificial intelligence can do their job better than they can. He said that
15:41thinking about it too hard turns dispiriting and demotivating because he has poured blood, sweat,
15:48and tears into these companies while sacrificing time with friends and family, and the machines may
15:53end up doing all of it better anyway. To keep going, he has to hold a deliberate suspension of disbelief.
16:00That is a man worried about giving his children too little to push against. One of his children has
16:05spent the last two years explaining, in public, exactly what that felt like from the other side.
16:11The daughter who says she got nothing. Vivian Jenna Wilson was born in April of 2004,
16:18the twin of Griffin. In April of 2022, she filed a California petition to change her name and her
16:25gender marker. The paperwork carried two reasons. One was her gender identity. The other was a line
16:32about no longer wishing to be related to her biological father in any way, shape, or form. For two years,
16:38she said nothing. Then, in July of 2024, her father sat down with Jordan Peterson at the Tesla factory in
16:47Texas and told an audience of millions that he had been essentially tricked into signing medical
16:52documents for one of his older boys, with the side effects never explained to him. He said the son he
16:59knew was dead, killed by what he called the woke mind virus, and that he had vowed to destroy it.
17:05Two days later, Vivian picked up the phone to NBC News. She spoke, because he had assumed she would
17:12let it go. And if somebody lies about her, blatantly to an audience of millions, she is not going to
17:18let
17:18that slide. Then, she took his 2010 description of himself apart, piece by piece. On the custody split
17:25he had once called even, she said he was there maybe 10% of the time and 10% was
17:31generous. Her mother and the
17:32nannies did the raising, and she said the absence was never explained, that at the time it felt normal,
17:38because she had nothing to compare it to. In the room, she said, he was cold, very quick to anger,
17:45uncaring, and narcissistic. She gave one memory from the fourth grade. A road trip she only later
17:51understood was an advertisement for one of the cars, where he yelled at her because her voice was too high.
17:57Rolling Stone recorded her word for that, which was cruel. Her sharpest line was that he does not know
18:03what she was like growing up, because he was not there. On the claim that he had been tricked,
18:09she was flat. She said he was not by any means tricked, and that he knew the full side effects.
18:15Then came the money question, where the title of this video gets tested against a real bank balance.
18:21In March of 2025, she gave a Teen Vogue cover interview and called him a pathetic man-child.
18:27She has been financially independent since 2020. The year she came out and the last year they spoke,
18:34and her health insurance and phone plan were cut off around the time she turned 18. Her life since then
18:40has been documented in her own words. She lives in Los Angeles with three roommates because it is cheaper,
18:46and has said she does not have hundreds of thousands of dollars at her disposal, and she talked about
18:52community college being expensive and about not having that inheritance. By the Teen Vogue summit in
18:58September of 2025, she said she was making money from modeling and brand work, and that before the
19:05magazine cover she was not. When a rumor spread that she was sitting on a $40 billion trust, she mocked
19:12it
19:12publicly. No public filing shows a funded trust for her or for any of the others. Her mother waited
19:19until September of 2026 to speak on camera in Alex Gibney's documentary Musk, which premiered at Venice.
19:27Musk did not take part and had called the project a hit piece. Justine told the film that Elon never
19:34tried to repair things, that it is not in his nature, and that he asked her to make sure Jenna
19:40knew how much
19:40he would always love her, then cut off her health insurance the next day. She learned the word gas
19:46lighting inside that marriage, and on their wedding dance, he told her he was the alpha in the relationship.
19:53That is one household. There are three others, and the money gets louder in each. With Grimes, the mother
20:00of X, Exa, and Techno Mechanicus, a custody fight ran from September of 2023, until it was settled and
20:08sealed in Travis County in August of 2024, with no dollar figure ever published. The $2,760 a month
20:16that circulates online is the Texas statutory guidelines sealing. Rather than a leaked order,
20:23Grimes said lawyers had exhausted her bank account and that she did not see one of her babies for five
20:28months. With Ashley St. Clair, the mother of a toddler named Romulus, the numbers are on paper.
20:35She went public in February of 2025, and on the 31st of March, he posted that he did not know
20:42for certain
20:43the child was his, that he had given her $2.5 million, and that he was sending $500,000 a
20:50year.
20:51The Wall Street Journal reported the earlier offer. She turned down $15 million up front and $100,000 a month,
20:58until the boy turned 21, tied to her silence. And after she spoke, the lump sum vanished,
21:06and the monthly payment was cut to $40,000, and then, she says, to $20,000. A LabCorp test put
21:12paternity at
21:1399.9999% and by the middle of 2026, she said she was facing eviction. Underneath all of it sits
21:22a belief he
21:23is never hidden. Asked at a Riyadh summit whether he had been doing his part for the birth rate,
21:29he did not dodge. He said, you have to walk the talk, that he does have a lot of kids,
21:35and that he encourages other people to have lots of kids as well. He calls collapsing birth rates
21:41the biggest danger civilization faces, bigger than climate change, and at that summit,
21:46he laid out the arithmetic underneath it. South Korea ends up at about a third of its current
21:51population, and perhaps a good deal less, with Europe at about half. Those figures assume birth
21:58rates suddenly recover to the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, which is happening nowhere.
22:04Let the trend keep compounding. And he projects many countries falling to 5% of their present size,
22:11or less inside three generations. In October of 2024, he took that message to a Trump rally
22:18in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, telling young people to start immediately, that people worry far too much
22:24about the cost, and that it will work out. He was worth around $240 billion that week.
22:31He has also called choosing not to have children anti-human, and in texts reported by the Wall Street
22:37Journal, he talked about reaching Legion level before the apocalypse. He has also admitted the
22:42cost. Past a certain number, he has said, it is kind of impossible to spend time with them all.
22:48In September of 2026, the podcast host Jennifer Welch called him the biggest deadbeat dad on the globe,
22:55and said his children's mothers have to post publicly to get support. His answer on X shows how
23:01he scores the job. He wrote that no one has provided for their children more than he has,
23:06and said nothing about presents, custody, Vivian, or the payments that shrank after somebody talked.
23:13And here is where the whole story lands, three years after that London interview. There is no will
23:19anyone has seen, and no voting trust. The educational institution he described as partly in place,
23:26has never appeared in a single public document. The super voting shares are still his, roughly 85% of
23:34the SpaceX vote and a rising slice of Tesla. He built a school inside a rocket factory, kept his children
23:41off the share register, and told the world it would be a mistake to do anything else. The one thing
23:48he has
23:48yet to do is sign a document that makes any of it binding. Click on one of the cards on
23:54your screen to
23:55see more videos like this. Reuters, Musk, Insiders Retain Voting Control of SpaceX After IPO,
24:02Filing Shows, The New York Times, SpaceX Pay, Board and Governance in the IPO Filing,
24:08Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit, Full Interview, 23rd of May, 2023, WSJ Live,
24:16Succession, Poll Court Clip, People, Elon Musk, on whether his kids will control his companies,
24:22Business Insider, Musk does not plan to give his companies to his kids, The Mirror,
24:28Trillionaire Elon Musk will not leave fortune to his children, Hindustan Times, Musk Inheritance
24:34Plan Coverage, BBC, Sam Altman testimony on Musk saying control might pass to his children,
24:41The New York Times, Musk's Austin compound for his children, Business Insider,
24:47Shivan Zilis clears the air on her relationship with Elon Musk, Business Insider correcting the
24:53record about my divorce, Elon Musk, 8th of July 2010, Forbes, what Elon Musk's first wife isn't
25:01even close to being, Elon Musk on X, 3rd of May 2022, Kids starting with lots of money, Stanford Interview,
25:092003, The Zip2 Origin Story, CNBC, How Elon Musk founded Zip2 with his brother Kimball, Kimball
25:18Musk on X, sleeping in the Zip2 office, Ars Technica, Elon Musk quietly tinkers with education,
25:26Astro Nova School, Wikipedia, Astro Nova School, Mother Jones, Elon Musk's schools, Bloomberg,
25:33Musk's new Texas preschool, and his education priorities, Fortune, Ad Astra school permit in
25:41Bastrop, Texas, The New York Times, Musk's daycare and school in Bastrop, MySA, Ad Astra school,
25:49Bastrop, Texas, The New York Times philanthropy filing report, Ad Astra intellectual property split,
25:56Unilad, Vivian Wilson on the Excel class at the SpaceX school, The Cut, Vivian Wilson cover story,
26:04Cosmopolitan, Vivian Jenna Wilson interview, Elon Musk on X, 16th of April 2024, 18 years of prompt
26:14engineering, Business Today, Musk on parenting as prompt engineering and school advice, NDTV,
26:21Musk on raising a kid as 18 years of prompt engineering, Business insider Musk says his
26:27kids were mostly educated by YouTube and Reddit, Clubhouse, Dirty First of January 2021, The Telegraph,
26:35May Musk interview, 14th of September 2026, The Times, Walter Isaacson on the Free Range Musk Childhood,
26:44Harper's Bazaar, May Musk memoir interview, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Years,
26:51CNBC clip, Musk and David Faber on advising his children about careers, CNBC, Musk on AI and Career
27:00Choices, 17th of May 2023, NBC News, Vivian Jenna Wilson's first interview, 25th of July 2024,
27:09Rolling Stone, Vivian Wilson responds to her father, People Vivian says Musk was not a supportive father,
27:15Teen Vogue, Vivian Jenna Wilson calls Elon Musk a pathetic man child, Teen Vogue, Vivian Wilson says
27:23she also worries about money, HuffPost via The Cut, Vivian Wilson on having no inheritance,
27:30E! News, Vivian Wilson details her finances at the Teen Vogue summit, Hindustan Times, the $40 billion trust fund
27:39rumor, The Blaze Musk on the woke mind virus, Jordan Peterson interview, Megan Kelly show notes,
27:47Musk woke mind virus interview, 24th of July 2024, People, Justine Musk breaks her silence in the new
27:55documentary, USA Today, Revelations from the Elon Musk documentary, The Guardian, six things we learned
28:03from the Elon Musk film, Variety, the biggest revelations from the Musk documentary at Venice,
28:09Business Insider, Musk and Grimes settled their custody dispute in Texas, Business Insider,
28:15The complete Grimes and Musk custody timeline, Brian Fagan, explainer on the Texas child support
28:22guideline cap, Wall Street Journal via archive, The Musk, St. Clair and Grimes reporting,
28:29IB Times UK, The Ashley St. Clair child support battle, Bloomberg Clip, Musk at the future investment
28:36initiative in Riyadh on birth rates, New York Post, Musk says civilization will crumble without more births,
28:44Business Insider, Musk at the Trump rally in Harrisburg on childcare costs and having kids,
28:51Benzinga, Musk says those without children lack a stake in the future, Newsweek, Musk responds to the
28:58deadbeat dad clip, 13th of September, 2026, IB Times UK, Musk rejects deadbeat dad criticism,
29:07KidsCo, The Elon Musk Family Guide, Vanity Fair, all of Elon Musk's children and their mothers,
29:15Polygrapho, fact check on the children owe me nothing, quote, Financial Express,
29:20the billionaire parenting guide.