Super-procreators, sperm donors and risky procedures: From Nick Cannon and Elon Musk to the ‘Baldwinitos’

When Nick Cannon said he’d be “all in” on having his 13th child with Taylor Swift, the internet reacted exactly how you might predict. “Taylor Swift has been single for one day (publicly) and already s*** men are seeing her as an available womb,” wrote one fan on Twitter. "Nothing has ever showcased Nick Cannon’s disgusting misogyny quite like him publicly saying he wants to impregnate a famous stranger,” another agreed. “Omg why did Nick Cannon just threaten Taylor Swift like that??” a third added. “I’m scared.”

Cannon – whose 12 children have six different mothers – has never tried to hide his unusual approach to procreation. He was evasive when asked by Howard Stern if he planned to father more offspring, saying, somewhat laughably, that he would “leave it in God’s hands.”  In the context of a (strange) joke, he and Stern went on to talk about the ways in which Swift might be an ideal partner for his next baby project. “Me and Taylor’s numbers are very similar when we’re talking about being in these streets,” Cannon said. “I think she would relate to me very well based off of like, ‘Yo, you’ve dated a lot of people in the public eye, so have I.’ We would probably really understand each other.” He added that he respected the way in which she embraced vulnerability through her songwriting. It was a surprisingly cohesive pitch.

Cannon is not the only person in the public eye who has a lot of kids, but he’s probably the most prolific. The names of his children have also attracted a fair amount of attention (spare a thought for Rise Messiah, Powerful Queen, Beautiful, Zillion Heir, and Legendary, to name just five.) He started off fairly conventionally, conceiving twins with then-wife Mariah Carey in 2011. Those twins – Moroccan and Monroe, who got off relatively lightly in the naming stakes – are now twelve, and their newest biological half-sibling (Halo) is just two months old. In fact, Moroccan and Monroe currently have four half-siblings under the age of one. Two of those were born to different mothers in the same month. As far as anyone can tell, Cannon has not been in a serious relationship with any of the mothers of his children since he and Carey had Moroccan and Monroe – although he says that he is “amicable” with all of them, and that for the most part they also get along with one another.

Much has been made of how involved a father Cannon must be to this multitude of kids. Though he claims that he speaks to each child regularly over the phone and sees them as often as his scheduling commitments allow, it seems indisputable that the mothers of the children are doing the vast majority of the work. When one posted on social media that she hadn’t slept in three days after the birth of her most recent newborn, online commentators demanded an explanation from Cannon about why he wasn’t there with her (or, perhaps, providing a night nanny.) She later deleted the post. People were similarly shocked when Cannon said on the radio that none of the mothers of his children receive monthly payments from him.

Pictures that Cannon posts to Instagram of himself cuddling his host of kids – one memorable one featured himself at three different residences with seven different children, including one of twins Zillion and Zion where they wore all matching inscribed pajamas (“Zilly”, “Zion” and “Daddy”) – have done little to stem the criticism. And it’s hard not to agree with a lot of it. Cannon is a prolific entertainer who spends most of his time on our TV screens and posting behind-the-scenes content from various media appearances. His career is only becoming more demanding – and he doesn’t share a home with any of his children. How often can he realistically be there for the day-to-day of child-rearing, when even regular divorced dads miss out on so much?

In July 2022, another celebrity figure in a very different sphere had a bizarre interaction with Cannon about multiple procreation. “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” wrote Elon Musk on Twitter, not long after it was revealed that Musk’s ex Grimes had had a second child with him. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”

“Right there with you my brother!” Cannon replied.

It was an audacious statement, but also classic Cannon, whose upfront and unapologetic approach to spreading his seed has always generated controversy. He has never shared the exact reasoning behind his “multiple kids with multiple mothers, preferably at the same time” approach, nor revealed whether those conceptions are happening the usual way or via IVF or similar fertility treatment. Musk, in contrast, chooses to speak about his own brood in ideological terms. He is helping the planet by having lots of kids, he claims. Society will collapse if the birth rate keeps going down. And his relationships with the women who have birthed those children seem a lot more complicated. He had six children with his first wife, Justine, the oldest of whom died of sudden infant death syndrome. He then went on to have two children with the singer Grimes, one while the couple were together and one reportedly after their breakup. Around the same time, he had twins with an employee at Neuralink with whom he does not appear to have ever been romantically involved.

In an essay for Marie Claire in 2021, Musk’s first wife Justine – mother to his deceased son, as well as a set of twins and a set of triplets conceived via IVF – wrote that she saw herself as merely “a starter wife” to the tech entrepreneur. She detailed how Musk moved out to Silicon Valley to start a business just after they both graduated from the same university. She visited regularly – she was bartending and working on a novel in Canada, and he was shacking up with three roommates in Mountain View and trying to become a millionaire. They were in their early twenties and their relationship was still fairly new. But, according to Justine, Elon already had procreation on his mind: “One night, over dinner, he asked me how many kids I wanted to have. ‘One or two,’ I said immediately, ‘although if I could afford nannies, I’d like to have four.’ He laughed. ‘That’s the difference between you and me,’ he said. ‘I just assume that there will be nannies.’ He made a rocking motion with his arms and said, happily, ‘Baby.’”

Elon and Justine lost their first son, Nevada Alexander, and coped with the loss, she says, by burying their feelings and refusing to talk to each other. Elon was reportedly determined to try for a baby again as soon as possible. Justine attended an IVF clinic just two months after her son’s death. Over the following five years, she gave birth to five further children.

What is Elon’s relationship with his children now? It’s difficult to say. He posted a picture of himself on social media with some of those children in 2017. But one of his twins with Justine recently gave some insight into how the relationship might be a little more complicated than that. Vivian came out as transgender last year. In a petition filed to change her first name and to take on her mother’s surname rather than her father’s, she gave the reasoning: “Gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”

Musk, like Cannon, can be found performatively working at all hours of the day or night. His most recent ex, Grimes, lives alone with their two children. It’s difficult to imagine – especially considering Vivian’s insight – that Elon spends as much of his time parenting as he does politically agitating on Twitter. Indeed, his social media presence, in contrast to Cannon’s, barely makes mention of his children at all; he once replied to a follower that he cared about people harming children because his first son “died in [his] arms” and was almost immediately contradicted by his first wife Justine (“Not that it matters to anyone except me, because it was one of the most sacred and defining moments of my life, but I was the one who was holding him.”)

Travis Rieder, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University, has been writing about the ethics of childrearing for over a decade now. He joins me on a Zoom call from outside a particularly picturesque Starbucks patio and almost immediately raises his plastic cup up to the screen to demonstrate his own moral hypocrisy. “I’m buying coffee right now and there are probably nine objectionable things happening here, right?” he says. “Capitalism, supply chains, the plastics – it’s all objectionable. And so how do you live your life morally if you think these catastrophes give us reason to act?”

The “catastrophes” Rieder is talking about are the global events now staring us in the face: climate change, food scarcity, mass refugee crises, increasingly unstable weather. These huge, scary inevitabilities are happening on a vast and catastrophic scale while our own actions – buying a coffee, eating a burger, using a plastic straw – seem almost humorously small by comparison. We’re never going to change the world by recycling a week’s worth of plastic containers, just as one family will never change the trajectory of climate change by having twelve kids. But we are compelled to act en masse if we accept the reality of the situation. So what are we supposed to do – and what does he do in response to such impossible-feeling demands?

Rieder has one child, a daughter. He thought long and hard about whether procreating was the right thing to do. “One of the things that I thought about for a long time is, you know, if I were making a decision to have a child by myself, I’m not sure whether I’d be able to justify it,” he says. “Because to me, being a parent was an incredibly attractive way to live my life, but I also have lots of other incredibly attractive ways to live my life, right? Raising a child is very resource-intensive, and I could use those resources and do other things that I think of as incredible. But I wasn’t making that decision by myself. I was making my decision with a partner. And not only was she much more convinced that the most meaningful way to spend a life was to have a child… Our joint deliberation was that we thought being parents was incredibly meaningful, and so we thought we were permitted to pursue that.”

Rieder believes that part of being moral is accepting that none of us are perfect; we’re all “permitted” our minor transgressions. For one person, being vegetarian might be an easy way to reduce their impact on the environment; for another, such a lifestyle would be untenable, but they might never buy from stores that mass-produce clothes. Someone else might remain childless.

“I do think that the sustainability limits on the planet give all of us serious reasons to think about our family size,” he says. “Now, for me, it turned out that was really easy to respond to because I’m incredibly happy to be the father of a single child. My daughter is the center of my world. And I think it would’ve been really fun for her to have a sibling, someone to play with, but we can create siblings with neighbors and cousins, right? We can create bigger families. And so for me, that was not morally demanding.” If he were “Catholic or Mormon”, or a secular person who simply had a “deep, deep cultural and familial tie to big families”, then the story might be very different, he adds.

As to Elon Musk’s claims of moral procreation because of the potential disasters of underpopulation, Rieder doesn’t feel they hold much weight: “The idea that underpopulation is a devastating problem seems to me an incredibly wrong and dangerous idea. Because there’s really good evidence that the world already can’t sustain 8 billion people, let alone the 10 billion that we’re heading towards. So the idea that we’re underpopulated and that [we should try to increase the population for moral reasons], that would create such an incredible strain on all of our ecological systems that it’s hard for me to imagine that a strong case can be made for that view.”

He adds that there’s not a hard line on how many people the planet can sustain, since a billion European vegans clearly consume resources differently to the same number of American meat-eaters. But one thing’s for certain: underpopulation is not the problem we should be striving to solve. But what about the mismatch in population, I ask? That inverted pyramid we see all the time showing that our aging population can’t be supported economically by so few young people? The US birth rate has been declining steadily over the past three decades and is now at a record low, which has led to a slew of older people demanding that young women (because it’s always women addressed by such research) stop waiting so long to have babies. Haven’t we all been told that as a society, we have to start having more kids, lest the economy collapse out from under us?

“I mean, the answer is that our economic system just has to change,” Rieder says. “The fact that it will be uncomfortable when it shrinks doesn’t change the fact that it has to shrink some day. That’s guaranteed by the finite resources of our growth problem.”

Musk plays within a very specific economic system, one that has supported him in becoming a billionaire and given him a platform from which to tout the advantages of having multiple children with multiple partners. But it has also blinded him to the fact that the solution might be outside of that economic system. Like a lot of us, he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too. Perhaps he personally has offset his climate-damaging choices by making electric vehicles seem desirable at Tesla. Perhaps not. Either way, he doesn’t seem particularly optimistic about the future of the planet, if his planned missions to Mars are anything to go by.

In 2022, when Nick Cannon was only onto his eighth child, Lainey Gossip published an article that compared people’s reactions to him versus Elon Musk. “With Cannon, there seems to be widespread doubt and concern about his ability to be a good, dependable father. Meanwhile, criticism of Musk is more about how irresponsible his actions are when it comes to the planet,” the writer, Stephanie Hinds, stated. “… Cannon has been grilled about how he shows up in the lives of his children in several interviews. And in response, he’s been fairly open about the day-to-day schedules of his children, which include things like a morning sensory class, ballet, and baseball games. Meanwhile, Musk has remained fairly tight-lipped about his paternity, secretly welcoming the birth of his second child with Canadian singer Grimes in 2021, and secretly welcoming twins that same year with a top Neuralink executive named Shivon Zilis. Cannon, however, has always been vocal about his kids, saying that each of his 8 children were ‘intentional’. He’s proudly claimed each and every single one of them, while Musk admitted in 2021 in an interview on the Clubhouse app that his children were essentially being raised by the internet.”

Lainey Gossip added that, although both men are “awfully irresponsible”, there is a tendency to believe Cannon is less involved with his children than he is – and that Musk must be more so – because of “stereotypes about Black men being absent fathers”.

The most conventionally “involved” famous father of copious children today is undoubtedly Alec Baldwin. The 65-year-old is a father of eight children, seven with his current wife Hilaria (or Hilary, as those who are weirded out by her possibly over-egged connection to Spanish culture might prefer to call her), and one with his first wife, Kim Basinger. Ireland Basinger Baldwin is a 27-year-old working model and her youngest sibling (Ilaria) was born in March 2022. Just a year before that, the Baldwins welcomed another little girl (Maria.) Currently, they have seven children under the age of ten.

Hilaria Baldwin’s Instagram page offers up a constant deluge of baby photos and videos, in which she refers to her brood as “Baldwinitos”. A lot of the content features Alec, holding toddlers’ hands on beaches, spread out in front of a fire with the kids at Christmas, or dancing round the kitchen with a baby. Apart from in its size – and the age difference between Alec and 39-year-old Hilaria – the family is surprisingly conventional. What’s missing from those photos is any evidence of how the Baldwins are able to maintain busy careers while parenting so many children, which assumedly is down to a slew of nannies and other household helpers. A vast amount of wealth helps to take away a lot of the inconvenience. Besides the fact that they can, the Baldwins have been fairly tight-lipped about the reasons why they chose to have so many children in such quick succession. “People ask why,” Alec wrote on Instagram last year, as a caption for a video featuring his daughter Maria. “This is why. Being a parent is the ultimate journey.”

It wasn’t much of an explanation. And there is much to be said of the ethics of procreation used by famous people whose economic power allows them to conceive in unusual, sometimes controversial ways – through surrogacy, to take the Baldwins as an example, or, like Elon and Justine Musk, through (presumed) multiple-implantation IVF. Back in the nineties and noughties, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie raised a few eyebrows with an approach to childrearing that included having three biological children and adopting three children in quick succession (especially considering the latter three — Pax, Maddox and Zahara — were international adoptees from three different countries. We’re less likely to look upon international adoption as an act of philanthropy these days and more likely to see it as complex, often problematic, and sometimes even neocolonial.) But procreation is an evolutionary drive that clearly expresses itself stronger in some people than others, and it ever has been thus. Celebrity outliers may simply be examples of what percentage of people would keep having children if they weren’t otherwise constrained.

Setting aside achieving celebrity status and massive wealth, there is one other situation in which one can have children without the regular strings attached: sperm donation. And while the vast majority of sperm donors conduct themselves ethically, there have been a number of instances in which they are clearly motivated by something else. Take, for example, the Australian sperm donor who, having already fathered more than 20 children, announced he was going on a “baby-making tour of Queensland”. Dr Karin Hammarberg, an expert in the psychosocial aspects of fertility and senior research fellow at Monash University, speculates that “there is a bit of wanting to show virility in this kind of behavior.”

“I know that some sperm donors boast about the number of children they father and that is a worry,” she says, pointing to the example from Queensland as well as one from the Netherlands where a donor fathered more than 500 children.

Dutch medical guidelines say that a donor shouldn’t father more than 25 children, but there are no legal consequences for men who choose to abuse the system; the case of that prolific donor only made the news because the mother of one of the children sought to legally prevent him from continuing. When you have 500 or more siblings, your chances of accidentally engaging in incest skyrocket – with all the medical risks that that accompanies. The Dutch donor, known in legal papers as “Jonathan M”, was able to continue donating because he was never honest with clinics and sperm banks about how many children he had fathered already. And, considering he only received the equivalent of around $10 per donation, it’s clear he wasn’t motivated by money.

Hammarberg is relaxed about the idea of children being raised in homes where their biological fathers are absent – “as long as the adults caring for the child have the child’s best interests at the core of what they are doing, I don’t think it matters if this includes the biological father” – but also suspicious of those men who pursue biological fatherhood as some kind of numbers goal. Celebrities, she adds, are of course special cases because of their financial position. But she points to a study on “multi-partner fertility” — that is, when a person has children with more than one partner — in more conventional families, the ones where millions of dollars aren’t coming in each month. That study found that multi-partner fertility was a strain on both adult relationships and the lives of the children produced. Interestingly, 15 percent of men have children with more than one partner – but of those, 36 percent have four or more children altogether. In other words, most men don’t have kids with more than one partner. But when they do, a surprisingly large proportion of them have a lot of kids.

Yet super-procreators are rare worldwide. The global average fertility rate is 2.3 children per family, and in the US it’s 1.9. Many point to this as a natural consequence of contraception: Family planning has allowed people to have the amount of children they actually want, the argument goes, rather than having to contend with unexpected pregnancies. But it’s equally true that a harsh economic environment for parents means some choosing to have fewer children than they might otherwise have had. Studies have shown that the happiest people report having either one or two children – but other research seems to show that so long as there are abundant childcare and financial resources available, people can keep having children with very little effects on their happiness at all. Which brings us back to the question: Should they?

That question might not just pertain to their own lives, or the good of the planet, but to the children themselves. The anti-natalist movement – essentially an embodiment of the clichéd teenage outcry, “I didn’t ask to be born!” – considers all procreation morally wrong. Existence is pointless, painful and grueling, its philosophy goes, and forcing someone into it without their consent is unethical. We know that life brings suffering, so creating children for our own personal fulfillment or to satisfy our evolutionary drive is indefensible. In 2019, one man in India even attempted to sue his parents for giving birth to him. He said it was a symbolic act – he didn’t actually want any significant amount of money – intended to underline his philosophy and hopefully bring more attention to the anti-natalist movement.

Anti-natalists sit on the other side of the spectrum to super-procreators like Elon Musk, who claim underpopulation as a moral reason for their own choices. But Travis Rieder thinks any highly ideological stance on childrearing is doomed to fail. Instead, he encourages practical philosophy.

“I don’t think it’s helpful to say: Hey, be an ascetic. Don’t have kids. Don’t ever go on vacation,” Rieder says. “Every time an environmentalist gets shamed in the media for going to the Maldives or wherever, it’s just like, them going to the Maldives isn’t going to destroy the planet. So you have to pick something. What that means is you have to choose an intentional form of life that makes sense of your commitment. And the reason I think that’s permissible is because your individual actions don’t cause significant harm. But they still matter… If you never do anything to address the environment – not agitating for change, not phone-banking for progressive politicians with climate legislation, not donating money, not restricting your own use – if you don’t do any of that in the face of what’s coming, then I think we’re all right to call you selfish. Even though none of these are going to destroy the planet, you’re just not committed at all. But we can’t all be off-the-grid activists. We can’t all try to have zero impact on the environment. It’s not sustainable either. So find your strengths.”