Author Ashley St. Clair told the Wall Street Journal that paternity tests confirmed that Elon Musk was the father of her newborn son named Romulus. She claimed that Musk did a paternity test, with a report from Labcorp revealing that the “Probability of Paternity” was 99.9999 percent.
While the 26-year-old was initially secretive about the subject, referring to her son by his initials RSC, a recent dispute over child support drove her to open up to the press. She told the Journal that the billionaire offered her a one-time payment of $15 million, plus $100,000 a month until her child turns 21, in exchange for her silence. After the publication of the Journal’s report, St. Clair claimed the amount Musk paid in child support had dropped to $20,000.
St. Clair posted about her Jewish identity following the Oct. 7 attacks.
“I’m Jewish. I support Israel’s right to defend itself,” St. Clair wrote on X on October 10, 2023. “However, I reject emphatically the bloodthirsty warmongers I have seen the past few days.” She later added, “My mother is Jewish!”
While Musk has fathered 14 children, if St. Clair’s claim to be Jewish is accurate, Romulus will be the billionaire’s first Jewish child.
The child’s name is ironic, given his Jewish identity. According to mythology, Romulus founded the Roman Empire, a favorite subject of Musk.
Musk has posted on X, his social media platform, that he believes the greatest threat to humanity is population collapse.
“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. While St. Clair did not state explicitly whether she had acquiesced to either request, the WSJ article suggested she had not.
In 2022, Musk’s father, Errol, was asked in an interview if his son had been circumcised.
“I don’t think so, I’ve never bothered about stuff like that,” Errol said.“It hasn’t really occurred to me, you know, I don’t know why you asked that.”
While Musk has never claimed to be Jewish, he has stated in interviews that he has a strong connection with the Jewish people.
“I grew up around a lot of Jewish people, I went to Hebrew preschool — my name is pretty Jewish,” he said. “I went to Israel when I was 13 — most of my friends are Jewish, sometimes I forget ‘Am I Jewish?’. I’m Jew-ish, aspirationally Jewish.”
For the Jewish community, circumcision, known as brit milah, holds deep religious significance. It is considered a fundamental commandment to welcome newborn boys into God’s covenant on the eighth day after birth. The practice is widely observed across the spectrum of Jewish observance, from Orthodox to secular.
Brit milah was first described as being performed by Abraham in the Bible. The commandment welcomes each Jewish baby boy into God’s covenant on the eighth day after his birth. It is performed by the vast majority of Jewish parents, including those who self-define as secular. The vast majority of Israeli Jewish parents even decided that they would choose the mohel of their first son to conduct the brit milah of their next male child. The Talmud states that the mitzvah (Torah commandment) of brit milah (literally ‘the covenant of the word’) is equivalent to all other mitzvot in the Torah combined and performing a circumcision on the Biblically mandated eighth day even precludes the Sabbath, The Talmud goes on to explain that without the mitzvah, the world would not exist. According to other Jewish sources, through the merit of brit milah, God split the sea for the Jewish people and permitted the Kohen Gadol (high priest) to enter the Holy of Holies every year on Yom Kippur.
