Epstein Family Values, by Melinda Cooper – 14 February 2026

The billionaire patriarchs of the American far-right want to rule an economy of masters and servants

Among the weirder features of the contemporary American far right is the emergence of ‘primal fathers’ – Old Testament patriarchs who want to sire not just a family, but a race. Elon Musk is the best known of these Aspirational Abrahams, although he is by no means the only one. A long Wall Street Journal report has documented Musk’s desire to beget what he calls a “legion” of children who would save humanity from demographic freefall and bear his superior genes into the far future. A Space X rocket stands ready to transport his seed beyond Earth in a process akin to inverse panspermia, the theory that organic life arrived on our planet via space dust.

Musk is currently thought to have at least 14 children with four women, whose legal and financial affairs are partly managed by Jared Birchall, the director of his family office. “We will need to use surrogates”, Musk texted one of them, to “reach legion-level before the apocalypse.” In preparation for this scale up in operations, he has acquired a multi-residential compound in Austin, Texas.

Silicon Valley pronatalism is generally understood as eugenic – a reading that captures the desire for racial purification, but not the distinct process by which purity is pursued. The “classic” American eugenicists of the progressive era sought to banish genetic abnormality, which they saw as responsible for mental degeneracy and other social ills. By contrast, Musk and his ilk are steeped in the pseudoscience of transhumanism – less concerned with the elimination of error than the exaltation of exceptional deviance. The ideal patriach is one who breaks from the normal distribution of intelligence with his uber IQ. He seeks not just to preserve the white genetic heritage, but to resurrect it on newly sanctified foundations. Primal fathers are revered as the founders of a new race, rather than the ancestors of an old one.

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Melinda Cooper is an Australian sociologist and political theorist. Her work deals with the political economy of neoliberalism, biopolitics and the history of capitalism.

Epstein Family Values, by Melinda Cooper – 14 February 2026

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