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What to Know About Elon Musk's Ex, Ashley St. Clair
Key takeaways:
Ashley St. Clair, a former conservative influencer, has a son with Elon Musk born in September 2024.
At the Venice premiere of the documentary Musk this week, she said she turned down a US$40 million offer not to speak about their relationship.
She and Musk have since publicly disputed her account, with Musk telling TMZ the offer "was never" made.
Ashley St. Clair is back in headlines this week after making some of her most pointed public comments yet about Elon Musk, the father of one of her children — this time from the red carpet of the Venice Film Festival. Here's everything to know about her.
Who Is Ashley St. Clair?
Born on July 31, 1998, in Florida, St. Clair built her early public profile as a conservative writer and political commentator, including as a longtime contributor to the right-wing satirical outlet the Babylon Bee and a semi-regular Fox News guest, according to Yahoo News.
What Does She Do for Work?
St. Clair's public career has spanned conservative commentary, satire and children's publishing. In 2021, she wrote and published Elephants Are Not Birds through the Christian conservative publisher BRAVE Books — a book she described as a rebuke of transgender acceptance, following an elephant character convinced by another animal that he must actually be a bird.
More recently, St. Clair has broken sharply from that world. The Washington Post reported on her shift from what she has called a "good little foot soldier" for MAGA-aligned media to an outspoken critic of it, describing how she now says influencers in that ecosystem took "marching orders and direct deposits" to coordinate messaging — a claim that has "triggered unease across the online right," where some former allies have accused her of being "a disgruntled attention-seeker moving onto her next grift," according to The Washington Post. St. Clair has also said she feels "immense guilt" for her past role in anti-transgender activism, per reporting cited by The Spokesman-Review.
How Did She Meet Elon Musk?
St. Clair has said the relationship began after Musk "slid into her DMs" on X, later telling the New York Post that they met in person at X's San Francisco headquarters, where she described him at the time as "funny," "smart" and "very down to earth," according to New York Post. According to the paternity and custody petitions she later filed in New York Supreme Court, the pair began a romantic relationship in about May 2023, according to HuffPost.
St. Clair kept the birth private for five months before announcing it herself on X on February 14, 2025: "Five months ago, I welcomed a new baby into the world. Elon Musk is the father," she wrote, as reported by the Yahoo News fact-check desk.
What She Said About Elon at the Venice Film Festival
The newest chapter played out this week at the Venice Film Festival, where St. Clair appeared alongside director Alex Gibney at the world premiere of Musk, a nearly four-hour documentary that uses an AI avatar built from Musk's own past quotes to simulate an interview with him. Speaking at the press conference, St. Clair said she had been offered a significant sum to stay out of the film entirely. "I was offered the opportunity not to speak for US$40 million," she said, adding that the offer came through Jared Birchall, Musk's longtime business manager, "on behalf of Elon," according to Screen Daily.
She explained her decision to turn it down and participate instead: "I want to set the example for my kids that you should never take being materially comfortable over speaking the truth." St. Clair also echoed the film's central thesis about Musk's relationship with honesty, saying his "most complicated relationship is with the truth."
Musk has publicly disputed her account of the US$40 million offer. Responding to TMZ, he said she "was never offered that and has a history of making false claims," per TMZ.
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