"Mr. Musk has told people close to him in recent months that he envisions his children (of which there are at least 11) and two of their three mothers occupying adjoining properties."

"That way, his younger children could be a part of one another’s lives, and Mr. Musk could schedule time among them. Directly behind the villa is a six-bedroom mansion.... When in Austin, he often stays at a third mansion about a 10-minute walk away.... One of the mothers, Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink... has moved into one of the homes with her children. But Claire Boucher, the musician better known as Grimes, who is the mother to three of his children, is in a protracted legal fight with Mr. Musk and has so far steered clear. The third mother is Mr. Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, with whom he has five living children, all in their late teens or older. There is room in the Austin compound if they were to visit, though he is estranged from at least one of those children.... Mr. Musk has said that I.V.F. is a more efficient way of having children because it allows parents to control parts of the process, according to a person who understands his thinking.... In 2021, without Ms. Boucher’s knowledge, Mr. Musk donated sperm to Ms. Zilis, who became pregnant with twins through I.V.F.... That same year, the billionaire and Ms. Boucher were expecting a second child also conceived via I.V.F. but carried by a surrogate.... Further complicating matters, Mr. Musk took a name that he and Ms. Boucher had chosen for their daughter — Valkyrie — and gave it to one of Ms. Zilis’s twins...."

From "Elon Musk Wants Big Families. He Bought a Secret Compound for His. As the billionaire warns of population collapse and the moral obligation to have children, he’s navigating his own complicated family" (NYT)(free-access link).

I wonder what kind of "control" he is doing with IVF.

"At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual..."

"... has to dial it up to 11. 'Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,' he declares, 'civilization will never become multiplanetary.' There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean? Isaacson has ably conveyed that Musk doesn’t truly like pushback. Some of his lieutenants insist that he will eventually listen to reason, but Isaacson sees firsthand Musk’s habit of deriding as a saboteur or an idiot anyone who resists him. The musician Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children (the existence of the third, Techno Mechanicus, nicknamed Tau, has been kept private until now), calls his roiling anger 'demon mode' — a mind-set that 'causes a lot of chaos.' She also insists that it allows him to get stuff done...."

Writes Jennifer Szalai, in "Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People. Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur depicts a mercurial 'man-child' with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match" (NYT).

"Grimes is enlisting free labor - potentially thousands of people, and a lot of them children - to make music with various aspects of her likeness, under the guise of a creative endeavor..."

"... and the chance to 'work with Grimes.' In reality, she's a burgeoning CEO in the midst of building a virtual sweatshop, something companies have been doing for eons, except now it appears this artist wants to give it a try. For example, not long ago she brought up taking 50% of the royalties of some of the more popular songs made with her likeness. And, just now in this article, she's playfully bringing up taking one of the AI-sampled songs someone made, and making her own version. She has all the right in the world to do it, but it's not a revolution I would like to see, and I don't understand why this would be something to praise."

The top-rated comment on "Grimes Invited Anyone to Make A.I. Grimes Songs. Here Are Her Reviews. The producer and pop singer, long a proponent of technological experimentation, has 'open-sourced' her voice using new A.I. tools. She’s been impressed by the results" (NYT).

Here's a page full of the labor of artists using Grimes AI and competing for a $10,000 prize.

Here's one example that was embedded over at the NYT and commented on by the true winner of this game, Grimes:

She said: "I love how weird this song is — it sounds really inhuman.... You can hear the technology very profoundly. What I like about the early A.I. stuff is that you can hear the technology very profoundly. I think people will appreciate that more in five years when they realize people only made stuff like this for a couple months."

So don't worry. This seems inhuman, but later AI will seem human. You'll be nostalgic for this in the future. You'll think something like: Remember when what was inhuman felt sweetly and tragically inhuman? We've lost touch with the poignancy that was the inhumanity of early AI. It's all just uniformly "human" now.

"She and Musk used a surrogate this time, which in combination with the pandemic enabled them to keep their daughter a secret, right up until Y shared the news just now" (by crying like the baby she is).

"That’s what they call her, by the way: Y. She’s got a full name, but this doesn’t seem like the moment to ask for it..."

I'm reading "'Infamy Is Kind Of Fun”' Grimes on Music, Mars, and Her Secret New Baby With Elon Musk/The visionary pop star holds nothing back, talking with Vanity Fair about everything under the sun, including her thrilling upcoming album, Book 1" (Vanity Fair).

[O]ne thing that really pisses [Grimes] off is how many people think that she surrendered her agency to [Elon Musk]. They took her silence for complicity, rather than how she viewed her silence, which was not submitting to their sexist horseshit....