Ashley St. Clair, a right-wing influencer, wasn’t the first woman to announce that she had given birth to Elon Musk’s child when she revealed the news in February. But she was the first known woman to be Jewish — and thus produce Musk’s first Jewish child.
Now, St. Clair reveals that Musk asked her not to give their son a circumcision, a venerable ritual in the Jewish tradition.
“While she was pregnant, Musk had urged her to deliver the baby via caesarean section and told her he didn’t want the child to be circumcised,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday in a lengthy article about Musk’s approach to procreation and managing the women he asks to have his children.
The story did not make clear whether St. Clair took Musk’s advice about circumcision but suggested that she might not have. “St. Clair is Jewish and circumcisions are an important ritual in the religion, and she decided against a C-section,” the story said.
Circumcision goes back to the Bible and is widely practiced by Jews of all levels of observance, including those who are otherwise non-observant. It is required for men converting to Judaism but is not essential for a child born to a Jewish woman to be Jewish.
Musk has said he believes that C-sections allow for bigger brains and thus more intelligent offspring. His position on circumcision is unclear, but his father told an interviewer in 2022 that he did not believe his son had been circumcised. (He also has a penchant for penis jokes and earlier this year joked about circumcisions funded by the U.S. government.)
St. Clair is one of four women who publicly have children by the Tesla CEO and Trump administration official. But Musk reportedly believes that a low birth rate among educated people is an existential problem and is seen as likely to have more offspring, according to the Wall Street Journal article, which said he offered St. Clair $15 million and $100,000 a month to keep quiet about her child’s parentage.
St. Clair and Musk named their son Romulus, the name of the founder of Rome according to Roman mythology, according to the article. Musk is fascinated by the Roman Empire — which he has said fell because of a low birth rate — and when he caught fire from many in the Jewish community for allegedly mimicking a Nazi salute in an address in January, some of his supporters said he was actually making a “Roman salute,” though scholars say no such gesture was used in ancient Rome.
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