The seed of Elon Khan

Ultra-prolific men are not like the rest of us

Niall of the Nine Hostages was a fourth century Irish warlord who caused his enemies to tremble with fear; he is credited with a particularly devastating raid across the water during the later Roman period, when Irish pirates frequently took Britons as slaves (including later, of course, St Patrick).

According to the legend, Niall found a beautiful wife after he and his friends were stopped by an old hag guarding a well - and made to kiss her in exchange for water. Only Niall satisfied the crone, who then turned into a beautiful young maiden, and they went on to produce an abundance of sons who in turn became the heads of many successful clans.

This may be legend, but DNA studies of the Irish show that around 2-3 million men – members of the M269 haplogroup - trace their paternal ancestry to one very fecund male who lived around the time of Niall. In 2006 geneticists had discovered that one in twelve Irish people are descended through the male line from this individual, as are large numbers in the diaspora; this included 2 percent of all New Yorkers, and various Americans such as Stephen Colbert, Bill O’Reilly and Henry Louis Gates. Certainly Niall, or some other figure at the time, had a large number of surviving sons who in turn were hugely successful in producing offspring.

If this love story is based on any truth, however, it’s perhaps more likely that a real Niall was satisfying a number of crones. Historically, highly-prolific men have seeded the earth through polygamy, common in societies after the rise of agriculture and early state-formation, where a small number of men tend to monopolise most of the women.

The most famous example was the Mongol leader Genghis Khan, founder of the largest contiguous land empire in history, who produced so many sons from his numerous wives and concubines that perhaps 1 in 200 worldwide are descended from him just through the male line (as opposed to total descendants, who would be far more numerous).

Morocco’s ruler Ismail Ibn Sharif had around a thousand children, and was likewise noted for his great cruelty and ruthlessness, apparently having the walls of the city of Meknes plastered with the heads of 10,000 enemy soldiers. In fact his total child count seems so high that a group of biologists even looked into the claims and found that ‘it would have been possible for Moulay Ismael to have 1171 children’ if he had sex three times every two days on average. Just imagine how grumpy he’d have been otherwise.

Pharaoh Ramesses II is said to have had over 100 children; Ibrahim Njoya, who ruled over the Bamum people in Cameroon, had around 350 from over 1,000 wives (a true Renaissance man, he also developed a writing system). King Sobhuza II of Swaziland produced 210 children during his record-breaking 82-year reign.

Nigerian Mohammed Bello Abubakar married between 86 and 120 wives, divorced 10 of them, and fathered 203 children; when he died, on his 93^rd birthday, it is believed that some of his wives were pregnant. If ever the phrase ‘still lead in the old pencil’ applied to anyone, it was Mohammed.

In Europe Augustus the Strong, ruler of Saxony and Poland, was supposed to have had sired 354 children. In contrast, England’s most prolific king, Henry I, had a pathetic total of 26, 24 of whom were illegitimate.

The urge that certain men have to seed the earth has not diminished, but it is approached differently. Today, if you want your progeny to span the globe, you don’t need to parade your enemies’ heads around town or drink from their skulls - you just open a dodgy sperm clinic and use your own ‘material’.

This has happened a surprising, and disturbing, number of times. In 2019, a Dutch fertility doctor was accused of using his own sperm to inseminate patients without their consent – and was confirmed as the father of 49 children. He was not a one-off, and in 2023 Forbes reported on the rising number of ‘fertility fraud’ cases, with more than 50 doctors involved. Among the many cases, there was Dr Donald Cline in Indiana, who fathered more than 50 children, as well as Dr Cecil Jacobson, Dr Jan Wildschut and Dr Norman Barwin, whose patients and children became the first victims of ‘doctor conception’ to win compensation.

Other men find ways to proliferate which aren’t quite as unethical but which seem, nevertheless, odd. In the Netherlands, a man was banned from donating any more sperm after fathering 550 children and ‘deliberately lying’ to prospective parents. Jonathan Meijer broke guidelines that donors are allowed to father a maximum of 25 children with 12 mothers, meeting prospective parents on forums and going on to produce as many as a thousand children. He claimed that he was ‘only trying to help’.

It is disturbing how often men will lie when it comes to procreating, even when there are no sexual rewards. One donor using a sperm bank site claimed to have several degrees and possess genius-level IQ, an attractive proposition which resulted in him fathering 36 babies. It turned out that he was a college dropout, a convicted felon – and had schizophrenia to boot (a highly hereditary illness).

Not all donors are so shrouded in ignominy. Austrian doctor Bertold Wiesner, who impregnated 600 women, worked with his British wife Mary Barton, an obstetrician who founded a fertility clinic, to help childless couples. Likewise, the women who have birthed the 165 children of ‘Sperminator’ Ari Nagel can at least hope that their children inherit his maths professor brains, if nothing else - a number have sued him for child support after being impregnated in the toilet cubicles of Target stores.

To most of us, however, there is something disconcerting about the desire of men to seed the earth in such huge numbers; as Britain’s ‘Joe Donor’, the father of 800 children, put it: ‘I've got kids all the way from Spain to Taiwan, so many countries. I'd like to get the world record ever, make sure no-one’s going to break it, get as many as possible.’

Yet Joe might now have competition in the form of the world’s richest man. Elon Musk, who has been vocal in his concerns about declining global fertility, has certainly been putting his money where his mouth is recently. As of last month, Musk was confirmed to have had a 13^th child, this time with Ashley St. Clair, who became a major Twitter influencer under his regime. Then, a week or two later, it turned out that a fourteenth had popped out, his fourth with Canadian executive Shivon Zilis and named, in line with Muskian tradition, Seldon Lycurgus.

Elon’s other children have names like Saxon, Techno Mechanicus, Exa Dark Sideræl and X Æ A-Xii, which perhaps says something about the man’s place in history: the proliferation of unusual first names largely reflects the decline of religion, and Musk is something of a post-Christian figure.

Christianity reduced the tendency of dominant men to monopolise women, through guilt, shame and stigma. It took many centuries and gathered steam from the 11^th century as the Western Church became much stronger and stricter about marriage: William the Conqueror could inherit his father’s dukedom of Normandy despite his parents being unmarried; his grandson Robert of Gloucester, one of Henry I’s many offspring, was widely considered the most capable person to succeed the throne, but by this stage the culture had changed enough that his illegitimacy ruled him out.

It was still perfectly normal at the time for kings and barons to have a litany of bastards, but in time the Church’s campaign had its impact. By the early modern period, such behaviour had become an embarrassment, and Christianity had created a sexual social democracy of sorts

Then, from the 1960s, that system broke down. A free market in dating is, like a free market in anything, one where inequalities become magnified. Today, levels of involuntary celibacy among males have returned to pre-modern levels, while a few men dominate the dating pool. This has the effect of suppressing fertility; the rising number of children born out of wedlock and without fathers once worried social conservatives a great deal, but non-traditional families, or whatever you want to call them, are generally less fertile.

The decline of Christianity saw the partial return of polygamy, with the modern dating system creating a number of different mating strategies. Across species, males tend to vary in their approach to fathering, described as K or r strategies. The former involves having a few offspring and investing heavily in them, helicopter parents being the epitome of this. The r strategy entails treating offspring more like frogspawn, producing huge numbers, investing little, and banking that some will probably turn out okay – the deadbeat dad approach.

The patriarchal system of Judaism and Christianity sanctions high fertility but also paternal investment. Signals of paternal investment also become important, acting as a reward and status-marker for fathers and children, which is why I would personally find it difficult to accept my children not taking my surname. Even if West isn’t an especially glorious name, and the most famous example is probably a certain builder from Gloucester - still, it’s my father’s name.

The breakdown of patriarchy has led to monopolisation but, with the added factor of the welfare state, has also produced the phenomenon of underclass polygamists, men like the ‘Sunderland Shagger’, who had 15 children by 10 women. He presumably has a certain charm, but I’m not sure that by any conventional measurement he is alpha male material, lacking the wealth which serves as a good proxy for qualities like intelligence or leadership.

Such men obviously have some instinctive desire to spread their genes, the same will-to-procreate found in sperm donors and Elon Musk. In Musk’s case it seems more motivated by pro-natalism than lust, and only one of his known children were conceived naturally, according to Grok (which he owns). Henry I’s chronicler and propagandist William of Malmesbury said of the king that ‘All his life he was completely free from fleshly lusts, indulging in the embraces of the female sex, as I have heard from those who know, from love of begetting children and not to gratify his passions’. While I’m sceptical that was the case with that old goat King Henry, it seems to be true of Elon, who is also determined that mankind populate the galaxy (a vision I strongly approve of).

While Musk is on the Right, many conservatives are uneasy with his parenting strategy, especially followers of the old religion. Matthew Schmitz wrote that: ‘Elon embodies the values of a genetic-determinist right that celebrates people with “good genes” having children under any circumstances. This vision of reproduction is sharply opposed to that of a more culturist right that insists on the importance of marriage and monogamy.’

While below-replacement fertility is a problem, Christian conservatives are of course correct to point out that polygamous societies have huge disadvantages, being more unstable and violent.

History is indeed filled with examples of prolific men producing warring descendants, half-sibling rivalries which proved especially destructive when their mothers were politically involved. When the Spanish arrived in the New World, the two dozen illegitimate children of Incan Emperor Huayna Capac were waging war against each other, fatally weakening the state. In the Ottoman system, in which the sultan would sire numerous children by concubines, the death of the ruler was followed by a chilling struggle for the throne in which the losing siblings would all be strangled, their bodies put into sacks and thrown into the Bosporus.

After Musk’s recent baby news, one wit likened it to the old Chinese imperial court, with all its backstabbing and drama, and who knows what Game of Thrones style battle will occur over the future Empire of Mars. As Rod Dreher put it ‘The “Succession”-style TV drama over Elon’s love children settling his estate after he’s gone is going to run longer than that Indian soap opera that has aired over 16,000 episodes.’ And one day, long in the future, the people of distant planets will tell myths about the highly prolific 21st century male who seeded them all.