It’s been almost a week since young X Æ A-12 went on a field trip on Dad Elon Musk’s shoulders to the Oval Office, and it continues to gnaw at the brain. The tape of their afternoon—the four-year-old child sticking his finger in Musk’s ear, pew-pewing what appeared to be an imaginary gun at reporters, slipping a booger under the corner of the Resolute Desk—nearly eclipsed coverage of Musk’s shell game assurances that there was nothing corrupt about his DOGE warfare on federal programs. It was so much easier on our blasted attention spans to laugh at memes of President Trump glowering over stolen attention. “X, are you okay?” Trump asked the clearly bored child at one point, in that tight sing-song he gets when tasked with paying attention to something other than himself. “This is X. And he’s a great guy. He’s a high-IQ individual.”
Some day, poor X might wish he hadn’t been trotted into quite so many adult rooms without his mature consent. (His mother, the pop star Grimes, sounds powerless in the face of her ex’s whims. “[X] should not be in public like this,” she sighed on social media after the fact.) And his presence at the press conference looked a lot like a cynical campaign to soften Musk’s post-heil image—as if monsters don’t have young children who love their parents too. Politicians have for time eternal pulled their family members out of their prep schools to smile nice for the cameras. Sometimes—as with little JFK Jr. peeking out from beneath his dad’s Resolute Desk, or Chelsea Clinton playing with Socks in the Oval—the result can actually seem genuine and touching. Other times, it doesn’t go well.
Apart from the PR value of X’s increasingly reliable presence at his father’s side in fortresses of influence, it speaks to the rise of a very specific male narcissism. There’s an increasing buzz in the tech-bro sphere about the need for “pronatalists” to wrest control of the gene pool. Trump is obsessed with epigenetics. Musk is seeding himself a compound in Texas. Why has he plucked X out of all his 12 children—or at least those who haven’t publicly denounced him as a parent? Is it simply that the son with the highest IQ score gets the honor of riding Daddy’s shoulders through the halls of the White House, while Don Jr. holds out his arms and cries “up up?” to his own father? X is shaping up to be Musk’s mini-me, heir to the throne of richest man in the world. As Grimes told Vanity Fair in a 2022 cover story, “I mean, I think E is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything…. X is just out there.” The irony of the pronatalist class obsessing over legacy while arguing for a return to meritocracy is truly wild.
It’s worth pointing out that only a father would—or could—bring his son to the Oval Office for a combative press conference. Whether you found X’s presence cynical or cute, your first instinct was probably not to comment on Musk’s stretched bandwidth and failure to prioritize. Nobody was writing think pieces afterward about a working father’s inability to have it all. Nobody questioned how Musk had dressed X or pointed out that he hadn’t packed any snacks or wondered if his childcare had fallen through. At no point did anyone ever attribute the child’s behavior to his father. Meanwhile, on social media, Grimes found out her son was at the White House when an X user wrote to her, “Lil X was very polite today! You raised him well.” The highest praise we give a mother is whether she is selfless, and how well she’s shaped convenient behaviors in her children. Even when that same mother has publicly complained about lack of access to her kids.
In 2023, the Vote Mama Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at encouraging mothers to run for office, released a report showing that less than 7% of members of the 118th Congress were mothers with minor children at home. That made 37 women actively engaged in the emotional labor that goes into mothering and contending with how hard the system challenges a working mother. And now, of course, we have Vice President JD Vance, whose idea of a solution to the childcare crisis is apparently to send women back home—and in the meantime, lean more on Grandma.
If only X got to go to a grandparent’s house rather than spend his time being paraded around rooms full of old white men who never learned how to express any genuine interest in children. But last week the boy was again stuck being his father’s favorite neck pillow, thrust into the epicenter of male privilege. During X’s field trip, Trump scolded CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at one point for daring to ask him a question about tariffs. “Excuse me, we haven’t asked you to speak yet, please. Alright?” Trump then pointed at a male journalist and welcomed his question.
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