Just when you thought Elon Musk couldn’t get any weirder, he chooses the worst possible thing to say in response to Taylor Swift‘s official endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The comment is simultaneously a new low for Musk and exactly what you’d expect from the tech mogul.
“Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life,” the 53-year-old father of 12 said in response to the singer’s Instagram post where she decided to embrace and re-appropriate the title of “Childless Cat Lady” in reference to an equally creepy statement by Trump’s pick for Vice President, J.D. Vance. Why Elon Musk would ever think that was a witty or interesting comment to make is beyond us, but, my god, are we feeling nauseous, right now.
Musk has built quite a reputation for being pregnancy-obsessed and his large number of offspring from four different women is only the tip of the iceberg. For years, the X boss has touched on the topic of the declining birth rate, earning accusations of impregnation fetishism on one hand, and engaging in eugenics on the other.
When news emerged in 2022 that he had welcomed twins with one of his executives, Musk tweeted “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” This is a sentiment he had echoed in the past, even going as far as bonding with Tucker Carlson over the issue (blaming it on birth control and the right to abortion instead of the real culprit — financial instability and a general sense of impending doom), and asking “smart” people to have more children in a 2015 interview with Ashlee Vance. “If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad,” he said.
The whole ordeal gains even creepier contours when you consider the fact that Taylor Swift is essentially a stranger to Musk and did not mention him once in her statement, or honestly, ever in her public life. She, just like many other women who have not had children, has been constantly harassed and criticized as the public (read, mostly entitled heterosexual men) speculated and opined on her private decisions regarding starting a family. J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment in the early days of his campaign with Donald Trump, aimed at career-focused women, and Musk’s accompanying quip are only two such examples.
Powerful men obsessing over women’s bodies isn’t news, but its ubiquity shouldn’t and doesn’t affect its repulsiveness. With Musk shaping up to be one of Donald Trump’s biggest allies in this year’s presidential race, it’s a good thing Swift, who holds one of the biggest fanbases on the planet, has made her own alliance clear with this recent statement. The Grammy-winning and platinum-selling musician is Team Harris-Walz, Team Childless Cat Ladies, and, perhaps most importantly, Team Let Women Do Whatever The Heck They Want With Their Bodies. And Elon Musk is just a weirdo.