Ashley St. Clair, a conservative social media provocateur, revealed she was Jewish shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks. Courtesy of Ashley St. Clair via X; Getty Images

By Louis Keene February 19, 2025

A Jewish right-wing influencer has come forward with the claim that Elon Musk fathered her son — then told her to keep it secret.

Ashley St. Clair, who posts content favorable to President Donald Trump to more than 1 million followers on X, shared Friday on the social platform that the child, born five months ago, is Musk’s. She did not reveal the child’s name, and is suing for his sole custody.

Musk has neither confirmed nor denied his paternity, and did not respond to an inquiry via X (formerly known as Twitter) from the Forward. Musk did reply “Whoa” on Saturday to a post claiming that St. Clair had plotted to “ensnare” him.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

St. Clair’s spokesperson also did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk has acknowledged fatherhood of a dozen children with three different women. If St. Clair is the fourth, she would be the first who is Jewish; according to the Jewish principle of matrilineal descent, that would make any of her children Jewish as well. (Some denominations, like Reform Judaism, believe Jewishness can be transmitted by either Jewish parent.)

She 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!”

St. Clair is a former contributor to the right-wing satirical publication the Babylon Bee and was fired by the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA after she was photographed at a dinner for white nationalists and antisemites, including Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. She has also written an anti-transgender book called Elephants Are Not Birds.

In an article published Feb. 15 in the New York Post, St. Clair said she first connected with Musk over direct messages on X in May 2023. She said she flew to San Francisco to interview him for the Bee, and that their relationship became sexual. She added that Musk paid her rent, and said that when she got pregnant, he demanded she confine the news to a tiny group.

“I was told to keep it secret,” St. Clair told the Post. “I was being asked to keep it a secret forever.”

The Post said that St. Clair showed a reporter text messages from a conversation between her and Musk’s manager, Jared Birchall, in which she complied with a request to leave Musk’s name off of her son’s birth certificate.

Since then, a pair of lawsuits St. Clair filed against Musk — one establishing his paternity and the other suing for full custody — have become public. They depict Musk as an absentee father who has met his son three times since his birth in September 2024 and has not been involved in his upbringing.

Musk has a mixed record regarding Jews and Jewish issues.

He has had several friendly meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, recently visited Auschwitz, and says “two thirds” of his friends are Jewish. But he also regularly consorts online with white supremacists who traffic in antisemitism, made what seemed like a Nazi salute at a rally following President Donald Trump’s inauguration and, at a recent conference of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, said Germans need to get over “past guilt.”

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount