COMMENTARY: Despite his vast wealth, Musk cannot possibly be a living and loving presence to all of his 13 children and their four mothers.
Jennifer Roback Morse February 28, 2025 at National Catholic Register
The first and most important duty of a father is to love his child’s mother. This is how a man ordinarily becomes a father in the first place. By this criterion, Elon Musk presents a bad example of fatherhood.
Before I go any further, let me clarify one point: Each and every one of Elon Musk’s children is a beloved child of God. Each one exists because God loves them and wants them to exist. I thank God for the life of Elon and Ashley’s new baby. We must never regret the child.
Still, Musk is a bad dad. Elon Musk has fathered 13 children with four women. How can he possibly love all four of these women and their children the way each one of them should be loved? And even if the moms are willing to settle for a mere share of Musk’s attention, their children didn’t exactly get a vote. The kids still need him to love them and their mom as well.
As numerous studies have shown, children flourish in continuously-married, low-conflict, heterosexual-couple households. Economist Melissa Kearney recently demonstrated the benefits children get from married parents in her book, The Two-Parent Privilege. Sociologist Brad Wilcox and his team at the Institute for Family Studies have been accumulating this type of evidence for decades. But what is behind these numbers? Why exactly do kids consistently fare so much better with their own married parents?
