Ashley St. Clair Says Elon Musk Cut Her Child Support After She Revealed Their Son
Ashley St. Clair, the author and former conservative influencer who shares a young son with Elon Musk, says the billionaire reduced the monthly support he offered for the boy from $100,000 to $20,000 after she refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement and publicly named him as the father.
St. Clair, 28, makes the claim in Musk, a documentary by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney. The film runs 232 minutes, premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 8, opened in United States theaters on Friday, and will later stream on HBO Max.
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It draws on four years of reporting and follows Musk’s path through Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter, which he bought and renamed X, to his current status as one of the world’s most polarizing figures. Musk did not take part in it.
In the film, St. Clair says the document she received was labeled a child support agreement but functioned as a gag order. She says it offered a lump sum of $15 million and $100,000 a month for 20 years. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the payments would have run until the child turned 21. After she declined to sign, she says, the proposed monthly figure dropped to $40,000.
It fell to $20,000 after Feb. 14, 2025, the day she announced on X that she had given birth five months earlier and that Musk was the father. The total reduction is $80,000 a month from the original offer.
At the Venice Film Festival premiere, St. Clair put a higher value on the arrangement, telling reporters she was offered $40 million not to speak. She has said she could not sign in good conscience because she did not want her son to grow up feeling like a secret.
She has also told the Journal that the agreement lacked provisions for the child’s medical care in the event of serious illness, and that it included no trust fund or life insurance if Musk died before the boy turned 21. According to the Journal, the draft also barred her from speaking unfavorably about Musk in front of their son but placed no equivalent restriction on him.
Musk, 55, has given a different account of what he has paid. Shortly after her announcement, he wrote on X that he did not know whether the child was his but was not against finding out, adding that he had given her $2.5 million and was sending her $500,000 a year. St. Clair rejected that description at the time, writing that she had asked him to confirm paternity before the child was born and that he had refused. She said the money he sent was support for his child, most of which he withdrew to punish her for what she called disobedience.
As she has described it in court filings and interviews, their relationship began in May 2023 after Musk contacted her on X. The two met in person at the company’s San Francisco offices. She says their son was conceived in January 2024 and born in September 2024, and that Musk’s representatives told her during labor to keep his name off the birth certificate.
The boy’s name, Romulus Musk, became public in an April 2025 Journal interview. Her filings say Musk has met the child three times for a combined total of a few hours, most recently in November 2024 in Austin, Texas. At the time, reporting described Musk as sharing his wish to build a large family, and St. Clair said he spoke of reaching what he called legion level before the apocalypse. Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, was among those she says she dealt with during negotiations.
St. Clair filed for sole custody in the New York Supreme Court on Feb. 21, 2025. Her lawyer, Karen Rosenthal, said then that Musk had financially retaliated against his child by reducing support substantially and unilaterally. A Labcorp paternity test the Journal obtained found a 99.9999 percent probability that Musk is the father, though he has not publicly acknowledged the boy as his son.
Musk’s lawyers asked the judge to seal the case in March 2025, a move that also limited what St. Clair could say about it, and he later joined a hearing unexpectedly by video. St. Clair told the Journal her legal fees were already close to $250,000, and she was photographed handing over the keys to her $100,000 Tesla Model S, saying she needed to make up for a 60 percent cut in support.
Later, she said she was facing eviction and began a podcast called Bad Advice after what she described as a year of career suicide.
The dispute widened in January. After St. Clair apologized on X for past remarks about transgender people, Musk wrote that he would file for full custody, saying her statements implied she might transition a one-year-old boy. She had not suggested she would. Days later, on Jan. 15, she sued xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, in New York state court, alleging that its Grok chatbot generated sexually explicit deepfake images of her without consent, including one built from a photo of her at 14.
She said Grok promised to stop, but the images continued, and that her X account lost its verification badge, premium subscription, and ability to earn ad revenue. Her suit called Grok an unreasonably unsafe product and a public nuisance.
xAI had the case moved to federal court in Manhattan and filed its own suit against her in Texas the same day, arguing that she had broken the company’s terms of service by suing in New York. Musk has said he was not aware of any naked images of minors generated by Grok.
The chatbot’s behavior has drawn a California class action, an investigation by the state’s attorney general and a formal inquiry by the European Commission. xAI said in mid-January that Grok would no longer edit images of real people in revealing clothing on X, though St. Clair has said users found workarounds.
St. Clair is one of at least four women with whom Musk has had children. He has 14 known children in all, including six with his first wife, Justine Musk, one of whom, Nevada Alexander Musk, died as an infant. The others include children with the singer Grimes and with Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive who announced the birth of her fourth child with Musk in February 2025, the same month St. Clair went public. Justine Musk also appears in the documentary.
Gibney’s film uses an artificial intelligence avatar to simulate an interview with Musk, built entirely from things he has said publicly. Gibney called the choice intentionally ironic, meant to contrast Musk’s actions with the story he tells about himself, and said his lawyers cleared the approach.
He also said he considers Musk extremely dangerous to democracy. St. Clair said she took part to show her children that comfort should never outweigh telling the truth, and has warned that Musk is stoking division that could become catastrophic if left unchecked.
Musk has dismissed the film on X as a boring hit piece, saying Gibney assembled a list of people who either have an axe to grind or do not know him. The custody case and the lawsuit against xAI remain unresolved.
