Justine Wilson and Ashley St. Clair have gone on record in Alex Gibney’s new documentary with blistering accounts of life as Elon Musk’s former partners.
Wilson, who was married to the Tesla CEO from 2000 to 2008 and shares six children with him, told Gibney’s camera that she first encountered the term gaslighting through her relationship with Musk. “He would reinvent the arena of the conversation and kind of like knock you out of it,” she said. “And then you’re like there and wondering, ‘What happened?'” She claimed he would list fifteen things wrong with her until she cried, then days later ask her to the movies.
The 55-year-old Musk has spent weeks attacking Gibney on X ahead of the film’s release, calling the Oscar-winning director a “douchebag,” a “crackpot,” and an “idiot” while dismissing Musk as “a hit piece that misses” that “makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours.”
Wilson offered a darker characterization of how Musk and his circle view the mothers of his fourteen known children. “I always felt we were pretty interchangeable in this story,” she stated in the film. “Somebody on Elon’s side referred to us as ‘the breeders’.”
She continued: “And there’s a playbook, you know, it’s kind of like an assembly line by now.”
St. Clair, a former girlfriend who welcomed son Romulus in September 2024, connected with Musk online before meeting in person. She alleged in the documentary that Musk told her he wanted to use surrogates as the only viable path to his desired family scale. She also claimed he refused to bring all his children to public appearances, and when she pressed him on certain absences, “He said, ‘Well, that’s because X is my favorite.'”
The MAGA influencer-turned-critic delivered one of the film’s most incendiary lines about Musk’s apparent prolificacy. “It’s like a Gatling gun of sperm in his DMs,” she joked, describing what she heard from other women who claimed Musk had messaged them about fathering children.
St. Clair also leveled a more sweeping allegation about Musk’s motivations. She explained in the film that Musk wants to “create a legion of children before the civil war.”
The documentary’s theatrical release on October 9 arrives at a volatile moment in Musk’s personal life. Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis announced on X just before the film’s debut that Musk had ended their relationship. Zilis, mother of four of Musk’s children—twins Strider and Azure, daughter Arcadia, and son Seldon—did not elaborate on circumstances or timing.
St. Clair claimed she refused to sign a $40 nondisclosure agreement to participate in Gibney’s project. Musk fired back on X, writing: “She was never offered that and has a history of making false claims.”
The billionaire’s broader family architecture has drawn increasing scrutiny as he has become the most vocal prominent advocate for global population growth. Four women are known to have borne his fourteen children: Wilson, Zilis, St. Clair, and musician Grimes, with whom he shares three children.
Wilson’s testimony about emotional dynamics after Musk’s early business success adds a layer of retrospective pattern recognition to accounts from later partners. Her description of cyclical cruelty followed by casual reconciliation—fifteen-item inventories of her flaws, then movie invitations—echoes the control dynamics St. Clair described around family visibility and favoritism.
Musk’s public posture toward the film has combined personal insults with strategic dismissal, targeting Gibney’s credibility rather than engaging with the specific allegations from Wilson and St. Clair. The “breeders” terminology, attributed to someone in Musk’s camp rather than Musk himself, nonetheless frames a operational philosophy that both women characterized as mechanized and replaceable.
Gibney’s four-hour documentary Musk is now playing in theaters.