Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk appeared alongside President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday night, making a string of bold — and thus far unsubstantiated claims — about widespread government fraud and corruption recently discovered by him and his team.
With the president and Musk was Musk’s 4-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, often called Lil X.
Throughout Musk’s stop by the Oval Office, X knelt by the Resolute Desk, picked his nose and whispered to the president. In other words, he acted very much like a 4-year old child.
But X’s presence also underscored the outsized presence that the unelected Musk is playing in American politics. The preschooler’s appearance in the Oval Office nods to the double standard faced by women in politics and reinforces the gender roles inherent in Musk’s beliefs about family.
Musk, a father of 12, is an avowed pronatalist, or someone who believes declining population rates are a major concern and has committed to work to remedy this by having as many children as possible. He sees part of his life’s work as repopulating the planet with as many children — and exceptional children at that — as possible.
Laura Lovett, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh who researches women’s political action in the 20th century and is the author of the book “Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938,” said Musk and X’s appearance in the Oval Office was a throwback to the kind of language associated with the rise of the pronatalists movement at the turn of the last century.
“Trump begins with identifying the son, X, as a ‘high IQ individual,’” she said. “Every time you’re using this kind of language around comparative investment in the offspring, you are explicitly invoking the history of eugenics. In this case, it’s what they used to call ‘positive eugenics,’ or encouraging the ‘right people’ to have larger families, which is very much what Musk does.”
Lovett said the optics of X playing beside the Resolute Desk also seem like an invocation of the famous photos of President John F. Kennedy and his son, John F. Kennedy Jr., a deliberate harkening back to a youthful president seeking to remake the country.
Lovett said it’s important to remember why X was brought to the news conference. It’s not a case of a child without caretakers or a parent with no other option but to bring their child to work with them. She also noted that this all happened as Musk makes headlines around attempts to cut the Department of Education through his role in the “Department of Government Efficiency,” his Trump-backed attempt to cut the government workforce and restrict what it does. “In a way, there’s Trump articulating that this is a child worthy of investment, because he has a high IQ, has the right parent.”
Pronatalism requires that people who are able to carry pregnancies — mostly women — be pregnant for large periods of time. These pregnancies can have a major impact on women’s participation in the workforce and economic mobility.
“Part of the language around pronatalism is language about gender roles, and the expectations of pronatalism is very much a kind of kickback on educated women and their declining birth rates,” Lovett said. “It’s remaking the notion of women as mothers — in this case done with a kind of co-option of the caretaking role, although it’s not really caretaking.”
She also pointed to the blowback former Vice President Kamala Harris faced during her presidential campaign about her role as a caretaker when discussing her involvement in raising her stepchildren and identity as a parent as evidence of pronatalists’ strict gender ideology.
“On the one hand we could celebrate the display of parenthood in the Oval Office as placing value on a political official’s whole self, including their caregiver role, instead of assuming that role prevents them from most effectively doing their public sphere job,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics. “But on the other hand, we need to consider how this display of parenthood would be received if it were a woman political official holding her child while speaking to [the] press.”
The other underlying dynamic of pronatalism is that, as frequently espoused by the new technocrat right, the world does not simply need more babies, but more of certain kinds of babies. Wealthy pronatalists frequently embrace tools such as genetic screening and testing to try to ensure that only embryos that have met certain screening for health and potential IQ are born.
X has been a presence at other moments in the new administration, also joining his father at Trump’s victory rally on Inauguration Day.
X’s mother and Musk’s former partner, the musician Grimes, said Tuesday night in a message on the social media platform X — owned by Musk — that she had not been made aware that Musk was bringing their child to the White House: “He should not be in public like this. I did not see this, thank u for alerting me. But I’m glad he was polite. Sigh.”
