The Wall Street Journal reports:

Ashley St. Clair wanted to prove that Elon Musk was the father of her newborn baby.

But to ask the billionaire to take a paternity test, the right-wing social-media influencer had to go through Musk’s longtime fixer, Jared Birchall.

“I don’t want my son to feel like he’s a secret,” St. Clair told Birchall in a two-hour phone call in December.

Birchall offered St. Clair some advice. His boss was a “very big-hearted, kind and generous person,” he said. But Musk had a different side. When a mother of his child goes “the legal route” in these discussions, “that always, always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise,” Birchall told the 26-year-old. Plus, he said, Musk wasn’t sure the child was his.

It wasn’t the first such conversation for Birchall. His public job is running Musk’s family office, and he recently helped organize Musk’s more than $250 million push in support of Donald Trump’s election.

Behind the scenes, Birchall also manages the financial and privacy deals Musk wants for the women raising the world’s richest man’s babies.

Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known.

Musk offered St. Clair $15 million and $100,000 a month in support in exchange for her silence about the child, whom they named Romulus. Similar agreements had been negotiated with other mothers of Musk’s children, Birchall told St. Clair.

The fight with St. Clair over the terms of the deal for their baby has been going on as Musk has assumed one of the most influential roles in the U.S. government. [Continue reading…]