the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

Roccus7 said:
I had read it, was a good read. What triggered me to read it was seeing the lions in Chicago and was surprised by the missing manes, but the Field Museum said that was normal for that group of lions.

Interesting that they were really brothers, and they both had damaged teeth...
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I recall a movie on the subject above way back as a kid maybe late 70's early 80's with the Lions going after the railworkers and tormenting a family hiding in a house which the lions got into
 
Boy, you really can't fix STUPID!!!!

Is a $910 Fleece Actually Worth It?​

Camping’s favorite material gets a luxury overhaul.

But, as Mr. Weiner, 43, the co-writer of the ur-cool guy fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, pleaded, this was no prosaic Polartec. It was an all-wool, Austrian-made fleece from the 5-year-old French brand Rier. With its gleaming Riri zippers and monochromatic scheme, it is like Dieter Rams’s vision of a Patagonia pullover.

“What really leaped out was the cut,” Mr. Weiner said. He tossed out adjectives: balloony, droopy, malleable. What he meant was that this wool fleece, which he purchased in a tangy yellow, draped unlike any other fleece he had tried on. His credit card didn’t stand a chance.

If Mr. Weiner is a mark for dropping the equivalent of more than six Patagonia Snap-T jackets on a single fleece, he is a mark among many.

At the Canadian retailer Ssense, Rier’s pullover is out of stock in a number of sizes and colors. Highsnobiety, the hypey blog turned hypey retailer, is nearly out of the fleece in brown. At Outline, a women’s boutique in Brooklyn, the jacket in a Tweety Bird yellow has flown off its shelves.

And Rier’s is not the only upscale fleece crowding the market.

The buzzy New York designer Colleen Allen offers a fitted $1,200 poly-fleece in a Victorian-inflected hourglass silhouette. It’s the fleece that stumbled into “The Gilded Age.” Drake’s in London sells a $530 bouclé fleece as nubby and vibrant as a stuffed Elmo. The princeliest fleece of all comes from the Milanese fashion house Miu Miu: a mouse-gray full-zip that frankly could be a $46 Colombia coat, save for the teensy Miu Miu logo on the left chest. For that it fetches $2,350.

If Miu Miu’s logoed fleece demonstrates the power of brand — particularly a resurgent brand led by Signora Miuccia Prada — Rier’s fleece spotlights something deeper about what shoppers crave today: clothes ordinary in look but opulent to touch.

“I don’t think the piece itself is particularly groundbreaking,” said Calvin Holmes, the men’s wear buying manager at Ssense. “But the fabric feels great, the colors are amazing and the fit makes it look great on pretty much anyone.” He would hope so: Mr. Holmes owns two Rier fleeces in navy and gray. (He said he used his company’s generous discount to get a deal on the pricey jackets.)

The fancy fleece reflects, or at least combines, several trends of the past decade in one irresistible package. In its banal fleeciness, it channels normcore, a knowing adoption of suburban-mall clothes. Its to-the-neck Patagonia-like shape nods to gorpcore, an inclination toward functional outdoor gear worn off the trail. And most of all, it syncs with quiet luxury, the very “Succession”-era push toward princely items like cashmere ball caps and suede field jackets that are elitist, but incognito.

“There’s a focus on fabric and construction and color versus obvious branding,” Mr. Holmes said of the fleece. He offered a surprising comparison: Loro Piana’s $980 Summer Walk loafers. They’re a conventional silhouette, lack branding and have become an in-the-know signifier. Summer Walks for Lear-jetting billionaires, Rier fleeces for buyers who trudge to Paris fashion shows.

There is also a cohort that seems to have convinced themselves that they’re punishing their wallets for the benefit of the planet. Mr. Weiner said he and others were “skeeved out by the notion of wearing petroleum.” (Most economical fleeces on the market are produced from polyester.) Shoppers like him, Mr. Weiner said, are soothed by the idea of buying something that connects them “as close as possible to some sheep on a hillside.”

If this is a rosy image of people who spend $910 on clothes, it’s one that will please Andreas Steiner, the Italian-born founder and designer of Rier.

Though he spent about seven years working at Prada, refining a palate for luxury goods at their most distilled, the inspiration for the wool fleece flows from growing up in the shadow of the Dolomites, where locals draped themselves in natural wool garments.

“If you go hiking, climbing outdoors, of course you need something that dries faster or is not that thick and heavy,” said Mr. Steiner, who displays a conservationist’s brio absent in most high-fashion designers.

His wool fleeces, he said, won’t leach microplastics into the water as polyester versions have been found to in studies. He went as far as to claim that the fleece could decompose entirely within about six weeks if it was buried. (The New York Times did not test this out.)

Mr. Steiner is aware that there’s any number of ways he could get the cost down. He could add thrifty polyester to the material, produce them in Bulgaria where wages are lower than Austria or switch the zippers. But that would compromise his vision. The price, he said, is “honest.”

Some shoppers seem to agree. Even if their wallets hate it.
 
dsedy said:
I recall a movie on the subject above way back as a kid maybe late 70's early 80's with the Lions going after the railworkers and tormenting a family hiding in a house which the lions got into
Click to expand...

Ghost in the Darkness with Val Kilmer?

Much better title than Patterson's.
 
Roccus7 said:
Boy, you really can't fix STUPID!!!!

Is a $910 Fleece Actually Worth It?​

Camping’s favorite material gets a luxury overhaul.

But, as Mr. Weiner, 43, the co-writer of the ur-cool guy fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, pleaded, this was no prosaic Polartec. It was an all-wool, Austrian-made fleece from the 5-year-old French brand Rier. With its gleaming Riri zippers and monochromatic scheme, it is like Dieter Rams’s vision of a Patagonia pullover.

“What really leaped out was the cut,” Mr. Weiner said. He tossed out adjectives: balloony, droopy, malleable. What he meant was that this wool fleece, which he purchased in a tangy yellow, draped unlike any other fleece he had tried on. His credit card didn’t stand a chance.

If Mr. Weiner is a mark for dropping the equivalent of more than six Patagonia Snap-T jackets on a single fleece, he is a mark among many.

At the Canadian retailer Ssense, Rier’s pullover is out of stock in a number of sizes and colors. Highsnobiety, the hypey blog turned hypey retailer, is nearly out of the fleece in brown. At Outline, a women’s boutique in Brooklyn, the jacket in a Tweety Bird yellow has flown off its shelves.

And Rier’s is not the only upscale fleece crowding the market.

The buzzy New York designer Colleen Allen offers a fitted $1,200 poly-fleece in a Victorian-inflected hourglass silhouette. It’s the fleece that stumbled into “The Gilded Age.” Drake’s in London sells a $530 bouclé fleece as nubby and vibrant as a stuffed Elmo. The princeliest fleece of all comes from the Milanese fashion house Miu Miu: a mouse-gray full-zip that frankly could be a $46 Colombia coat, save for the teensy Miu Miu logo on the left chest. For that it fetches $2,350.

If Miu Miu’s logoed fleece demonstrates the power of brand — particularly a resurgent brand led by Signora Miuccia Prada — Rier’s fleece spotlights something deeper about what shoppers crave today: clothes ordinary in look but opulent to touch.

“I don’t think the piece itself is particularly groundbreaking,” said Calvin Holmes, the men’s wear buying manager at Ssense. “But the fabric feels great, the colors are amazing and the fit makes it look great on pretty much anyone.” He would hope so: Mr. Holmes owns two Rier fleeces in navy and gray. (He said he used his company’s generous discount to get a deal on the pricey jackets.)

The fancy fleece reflects, or at least combines, several trends of the past decade in one irresistible package. In its banal fleeciness, it channels normcore, a knowing adoption of suburban-mall clothes. Its to-the-neck Patagonia-like shape nods to gorpcore, an inclination toward functional outdoor gear worn off the trail. And most of all, it syncs with quiet luxury, the very “Succession”-era push toward princely items like cashmere ball caps and suede field jackets that are elitist, but incognito.

“There’s a focus on fabric and construction and color versus obvious branding,” Mr. Holmes said of the fleece. He offered a surprising comparison: Loro Piana’s $980 Summer Walk loafers. They’re a conventional silhouette, lack branding and have become an in-the-know signifier. Summer Walks for Lear-jetting billionaires, Rier fleeces for buyers who trudge to Paris fashion shows.

There is also a cohort that seems to have convinced themselves that they’re punishing their wallets for the benefit of the planet. Mr. Weiner said he and others were “skeeved out by the notion of wearing petroleum.” (Most economical fleeces on the market are produced from polyester.) Shoppers like him, Mr. Weiner said, are soothed by the idea of buying something that connects them “as close as possible to some sheep on a hillside.”

If this is a rosy image of people who spend $910 on clothes, it’s one that will please Andreas Steiner, the Italian-born founder and designer of Rier.

Though he spent about seven years working at Prada, refining a palate for luxury goods at their most distilled, the inspiration for the wool fleece flows from growing up in the shadow of the Dolomites, where locals draped themselves in natural wool garments.

“If you go hiking, climbing outdoors, of course you need something that dries faster or is not that thick and heavy,” said Mr. Steiner, who displays a conservationist’s brio absent in most high-fashion designers.

His wool fleeces, he said, won’t leach microplastics into the water as polyester versions have been found to in studies. He went as far as to claim that the fleece could decompose entirely within about six weeks if it was buried. (The New York Times did not test this out.)

Mr. Steiner is aware that there’s any number of ways he could get the cost down. He could add thrifty polyester to the material, produce them in Bulgaria where wages are lower than Austria or switch the zippers. But that would compromise his vision. The price, he said, is “honest.”

Some shoppers seem to agree. Even if their wallets hate it.
Click to expand...
Should come with a free Yeti cooler....
 
jpd said:
Should come with a free Yeti cooler....
Click to expand...
Oh, not the cooler, but the Yeti 5 Gallon Fishing Bucket, if they're still pimping that or realized the $3 buckets from Lowes or Home Depot are dominating that market. IIRC Yeti was charging ~$50 for those!!!

I'm blessed in that I can get freebies at the dump when lobstermen dump their pig hide lobster bait buckets off.
 
Unreal! WTF 🤬
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That’s a Lot of Cheddar: Scammers Steal $390,000 of British Cheese​

Neal’s Yard, a leading cheese retailer in London, said that a shipment of 22 metric tons of rare Cheddar had disappeared in the con.

It’s been called “the grate cheese robbery.”

But it’s no joke to the tight-knit world of artisanal British cheese makers, which is reeling from the disappearance of 22 metric tons of rare Cheddar worth at least 300,000 pounds, about $390,000, in what appears to be the biggest con to hit their industry in decades.

“We never imagined that this sort of thing would happen,” said Patrick Holden, whose dairy farm in Wales made some of the missing Cheddar.

“Of course,” he added, “people have bad debts. But theft? I mean, that just doesn’t happen.”

It all started in July. That’s when Neal’s Yard Dairy, a leading London cheese retailer, said that it had received a major order from what appeared to be a “legitimate wholesale distributor for a major French retailer.”

The company turned to Mr. Holden’s dairy farm and to two other cheese producers — Westcombe Dairy and Trethowan Brothers — to fill the order, which, at 22 metric tons, was more than one could provide alone.

Mr. Holden said that he was initially flattered. A French chain wanted to buy that much British cheese? And Cheddar, such a quintessentially British variety?

“We’d been going around, proudly, saying: ‘Guess what, a French supermarket is buying our cheese,’” Mr. Holden said, chuckling.

“We never thought that would happen,” he continued. “Well, turns out, it hasn’t.”

Neal’s Yard sent the cheese off in two shipments in September — and payment was due on Oct. 7, according to a partner in the company, David Lockwood. When the money had not come through a week later, Mr. Lockwood said, Neal’s Yard tried to chase up the payment but got no response.

“Basically, our contacts became uncontactable,” said Mr. Lockwood, who declined to share the correspondence with The New York Times.

The company went to the police in London on Oct. 21, “when we were certain we’d been scammed,” Mr. Lockwood added in a text message.

London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed that it had received a report about “the theft of a large quantity of cheese” from a company in Southwark, a borough in the southeastern part of the British capital where Neal’s Yard has a warehouse.

Criminals have hit the dairy industry before. In 2015, the Italian police arrested a gang accused of stealing about $875,000 worth of Parmigiano-Reggiano. The following year, thieves in Wisconsin stole a trailer with about $46,000 of cheese. More recently, thieves made off with about $23,000 of cheese in the Netherlands.

But while “this kind of thing does happen in Italy a bit more,” said Patrick McGuigan, a British food writer who has written two books about cheese, he added, “in the U.K., it’s very, very rare.”

Not unprecedented, though. In a cheese heist in Britain in 1998, thieves reportedly made off with six tons of champion Cheddar.

Offloading the stolen cheese could prove difficult, Mr. McGuigan said. “It’s a bit like, you know, if you steal a Van Gogh painting, it’s quite hard to sell it, because everybody knows it’s a Van Gogh painting,” he explained.

The police are investigating the latest case. No arrests have been made. For now, the industry is urging vigilance. Jamie Oliver, a British celebrity chef, warned cheese enthusiasts to be “wary of suspiciously large quantities of premium Cheddar on the black market.”

“Remember, if the deal seems too gouda to be true, it probably is,” he wrote on Instagram. “Let’s find these cheese stealers.”

The cheese producers were mourning the loss on several levels.

“I feel like I knew each one individually,” said Todd Trethowan of the lost wheels of Cheddar his farm provided. “To think that it had gone missing, and that waste of effort, it was a blow.”

Mr. Lockwood said that Neal’s Yard had honored its payments to the three cheese makers. There are also the additional costs of the lost labor, packing and shipping.

He said that he did not think his company would recoup much from insurance. “Remember, we loaded it onto the truck,” he said. “We were scammed.”

But Mr. Lockwood said that the company was also trying to learn from the experience — and maybe look for a silver lining.

“It’d be a great action comedy,” he said. “Maybe we can sell the rights and get some of the money back.”
 
Break out your dead...

Was Stone Age Scandinavia Struck by Plague?​

New research by geneticists hints at the deadly work of Yersinia pestis 5,000 years ago.

At the end of the Stone Age, some 5,300 years ago, the populations of Scandinavia and northwest Europe plummeted, and farming communities evaporated. “People stopped building megaliths, like Stonehenge,” said Frederik Seersholm, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen. “Settlements were abandoned. Everyone vanished.”

The so-called Neolithic decline, which lasted several centuries, is believed to have allowed a nomadic herding culture known as the Yamnaya to migrate west, altering the genetic makeup of early Europeans. The cause of this demographic collapse has been an open question, with the suspects including wars and agricultural crises.

A new genomic study published in July in the journal Nature makes the case for another candidate, which had been found in people living at the time but was never thought to have been widespread: the plague.
Until now, it was unclear how virulent the Neolithic plague was within a human population. “There is a hypothesis that the oldest plague bacterium lacked epidemic potential,” said Dr. Seersholm, the lead author of the paper. “That hypothesis no longer holds.”

The researchers propose that a Stone Age pandemic originated in small farming villages and spread to mega-settlements and far-off lands along with traders who traveled by horse-drawn cart. “We can’t prove that this was exactly how it happened, not yet, anyway,” Dr. Seersholm said. “Still, it’s significant that we can show it could have happened.”

‘Bring out your dead’​

Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The bubonic and septicemic forms — mainly infecting the lymph nodes and blood — are typically transmitted through fleas and rats. The more deadly pneumonic form, which affects the lungs, travels on airborne droplets and is contagious in people and animals.

In her book “Plague,” Wendy Orent, an anthropologist in Atlanta, speculates that the first account of bubonic plague was the Old Testament story of the Philistines who stole the ark of the covenant from the Israelites and were afflicted with “swellings.” Since then, Yersinia pestis has been the driver of three documented scourges that erupted on the world stage.

The first recorded reports of the plague were in the Egyptian port town of Pelusium during the summer of 541 A.D. For the next 200 years, the Plague of Justinian — named for the Byzantine emperor who caught the disease but survived — deepened the social and economic collapse of western Europe and claimed the lives of 30 million to 50 million people across three continents.

The next major outbreak of the plague has been pinned on a variant of Yersinia pestis that most likely jumped from wild marmots to humans in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan. The first recorded emergence occurred in the 14th century during the siege of Kaffa, a Genoese trading port in Crimea, where the Mongols reportedly catapulted disease-ridden corpses over the walls.

From 1346-53, the Black Death — a grim reference to the gangrenous blackening and death of tissue, mostly on the extremities — wiped out perhaps half of Europe’s population. It proved to be the initial wave of a nearly 500-year contagion that included the Great Plague of London in 1665-66, as a witness observed, “The warning cry ‘bring out your dead’ and the rumble of the ‘dead-carts’ disturbed the stillness of the night.”

A descendant of that strain is blamed for the third pandemic, known as the Modern Plague, which originated in 1855 in China and traversed the globe over the next several decades, resulting in the deaths of about 12 million people in India alone. Although it still smolders in small pockets worldwide — the United States about seven cases a year, on average — the Modern Plaque is now treatable with antibiotics if caught early.

Generations of pestilence​

In 2001, biologists in England successfully decoded the full DNA sequence of Yersinia pestis by mapping a mutation that had killed a Colorado veterinarian after an infected cat sneezed on him. A decade later, scientists reported the discovery of the microbes in human teeth from Eurasia that dated back 5,000 years.

Three years ago, researchers announced that plague genomes had been recovered from the Stone Age skull of a man who lived in what is now Latvia. And in 2023, the earliest known evidence of the plague in Britain was unearthed in the dental pulp of three 4,000-year-old skeletons. “The ability to detect ancient pathogens from degraded samples from thousands of years ago is incredible,” said Pooja Swali, the geneticist at University College London who identified the bacterium.

The authors of the new paper sequenced the genomes of the skeletal remains from 108 people at nine burial sites over a wide geographic area in Sweden and Denmark. All of the bodies were interred between 3300 B.C. and 2900 B.C.

Of the six pathogens observed in the research, Yersinia pestis was the most prevalent, present in about 17 percent of the bodies. “In other words, one in six people had active infections of plague at the time of death,” Dr. Seersholm said. “But that ratio probably underestimates the true frequency of the bacterium.”

The DNA of a family excavated from one tomb was mapped for six generations, spanning about 120 years. Twelve of the 38 family members were infected with Yersinia pestis, which Dr. Seersholm said was almost certainly pneumonic because it was missing some of the genes that would enable the bubonic form to spread from fleas to rodents to humans. “So no rats were required,” he said.

Dr. Seersholm’s team concluded that the plague arrived in three distinct waves, evolving with each new generation. The first two waves appear to have been relatively mild, but the third seems more potent and may have been culpable in the Neolithic decline.

Dr. Swali lauded the scholarship of the project but remained unconvinced that the plague led to mass death rather than isolated infections. “Yersinia pestis may have played a role in the decline or dealt some final blows,” she said. “But there were many other factors that could have contributed to small and already declining population sizes, such as famine or other diseases that may be trickier to detect.”

Kyle Harper, a historian at the University of Oklahoma and author of “Plagues Upon the Earth,” said that not long ago, before archaeologists and geneticists began collaborating, the plague was not credibly implicated in the Neolithic decline. Witness accounts abound for the Justinian Plague and the Black Death, but the prehistoric strain remains an enigma. “How did it spread?” Dr. Harper said. “How did it affect people? These are still huge unknowns.”
 
Damn, I just passed through Wisconsin...

Wisconsin Pizzeria Error Led Dozens to Eat Cannabis Oil Pizza​

At least five customers sought medical attention after eating pizza from the store, Famous Yeti’s Pizza, which accidentally used a legal THC oil, health officials said.

At least five people sought medical attention and dozens were reportedly affected last week after a Wisconsin pizza parlor accidentally used cannabis oil on some of its pies, officials said.

On Oct. 22, a man operating the shop, Famous Yeti’s Pizza in Stoughton, Wis., about 20 miles southeast of Madison, ran out of oil while making pizzas. So he went to an industrial kitchen nearby shared by multiple businesses and took oil that belonged to a different business, Public Health Madison and Dane County said in a statement.

“There was a label on the cap that had manufacturer’s information, use by date, and noted it contained Delta-9 cannabis,” the health department said, referring to a scientific term used to describe THC. “The operator did not notice the label on the cap.”

The oil, which the health department said was a “legally purchased product,” was being used as “food-grade hemp” by another business, the owners of Famous Yeti’s, Caitlin and Cale Ryan, said in an email. They “began investigating what might have occurred” when one of its owners “started experiencing unexpected physical symptoms after eating the pizza,” the statement said.

The oil contained THC, which is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana and has “intoxicating effects, meaning it can temporarily alter a person’s mood, thoughts, and perceptions,” according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

In Wisconsin, marijuana is not legal. But the oil that in the pizza “doesn’t face the same laws and regulations as marijuana because it comes from the hemp plant,” the health department said. “The oil can be used to make everything from cookies to condiments.”

On Thursday Stoughton emergency officials contacted the health department after they had “transported” five people with a “possible food-borne illness exposure,” the department said. The contaminated pizzas had been served from Oct. 22 until Oct. 24.

Famous Yeti’s served “60 contaminated pizzas,” one of the store’s owners told WMTV, a local television station. The restaurant closed on Friday to “deep clean the restaurant,” a statement on its Facebook page said.

The total number of people who were hospitalized as a result of the contaminated pizza and the extent of the injuries was not immediately clear. The health department did not immediately respond to a question seeking that information. But the department said it had “received dozens of reports” from people feeling affected and alluded to multiple people having been sent to the hospital.

“Possible THC-related symptoms include dizziness, increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, nausea, vomiting, anxiety, panic attacks, paranoia, hallucinations, short term memory impacts, time distortion, and sleepiness,” the department said. “Keep in mind each person’s reaction may be different, and the concentration of THC in the pizza can vary by piece.”

The comments on Famous Yeti’s social media posts were overwhelmingly positive. Many people expressed appreciation for the business’s openness about its mistake and expression of regret. A few customers also — possibly in jest — saw the news as even more reason to patronize the restaurant.

“When i come and I wink twice,” one commenter wrote, “I want that pizza alright lol.”
 

A new version of "Sister Wives"???​

Elon Musk Wants Big Families. He Bought a Secret Compound for His.​

As the billionaire warns of population collapse and the moral obligation to have children, he’s navigating his own complicated family.

This is where Elon Musk, 53, the world’s richest man and perhaps the most important campaign backer of former President Donald J. Trump, has been trying to establish the cornerstone of an unusual family compound, according to four people familiar with his plans.

Mr. Musk has told people close to him in recent months that he envisions his children (of which there are at least 11) and two of their three mothers occupying adjoining properties. That way, his younger children could be a part of one another’s lives, and Mr. Musk could schedule time among them.

Directly behind the villa is a six-bedroom mansion that Mr. Musk helped purchase, according to two of the people and public records. The total cost of both properties was about $35 million. When in Austin, he often stays at a third mansion about a 10-minute walk away, the people said.

Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children and one secretive, multibillionaire father who obsesses about declining birthrates when he isn’t overseeing one of his six companies: It is an unconventional family situation, and one that Mr. Musk seems to want to make even bigger.

A proponent of in vitro fertilization, Mr. Musk believes strongly in increasing the world’s population. He has even offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances, including the former independent vice-presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, according to two people familiar with his offer. Ms. Shanahan turned him down.

Mr. Musk has tried to keep his own growing family a secret. The compound, and his efforts to fill it with his children, which have not been previously reported, isn’t just a personal matter for him; it is rooted in the existential anxieties that underpin his business empire.

He was an early investor in his electric car company, Tesla, out of concerns about reliance on fossil fuels. He founded his rocket company, SpaceX, now a significant government contractor, so that he could colonize Mars for humans in case Earth becomes uninhabitable.

Over the last two years, he has become increasingly fixated on what he sees as another threat: declining birthrates. He believes a global population collapse is coming that will wipe out humanity. His apocalyptic vision is unlikely, according to demographers, but on X, the social media company he owns, he has been encouraging followers to have as many children as possible.

“It should be considered a national emergency to have kids,” Mr. Musk posted in June.

For the moment, Mr. Musk is temporarily encamped in Pennsylvania, immersed in the presidential campaign and spending tens of millions of dollars to finance Mr. Trump’s get-out-the-vote operations. A Trump victory could make Mr. Musk perhaps the most powerful private citizen in the country, and Mr. Trump has already said he would appoint the billionaire to oversee an “efficiency commission” to scrutinize the workings of the entire federal government.

But it is in Texas where Mr. Musk has moved much of his business operations and is trying to establish his family compound. The compound is off to a bumpy start.

One of the mothers, Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, Mr. Musk’s brain technology start-up, has moved into one of the homes with her children. But Claire Boucher, the musician better known as Grimes, who is the mother to three of his children, is in a protracted legal fight with Mr. Musk and has so far steered clear.

The third mother is Mr. Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, with whom he has five living children, all in their late teens or older. There is room in the Austin compound if they were to visit, though he is estranged from at least one of those children.

In choosing Senator JD Vance as his running mate, Mr. Trump brought declining birthrates to the forefront of this year’s presidential election. Mr. Vance, who has raised alarms about the issue, made headlines for scolding “childless cat ladies.” Mr. Musk’s push for procreation also aligns globally with world leaders like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and has made him something of a hero among pronatalists, who believe people should have as many children as possible.

In a biography published in 2015, Mr. Musk worried that educated people weren’t having enough children. “I’m not saying like only smart people should have kids. I’m just saying that smart people should have kids as well,” he said. “I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s probably not good.’”

His views seem to echo those of his father, Errol Musk. The elder Mr. Musk, who is 78 and has seven children with three women, praised his son’s “good genes” and desire to have many children.

“You breed horses,” Errol Musk said in an interview in September. “People are the same. If you have a good father and a good mother, you’ll have exceptional children. If you have no children, I feel very sorry for you.”

In a book published in 2023, Elon Musk told his biographer that he and his father, who lives in South Africa, are sometimes estranged, partly because Errol Musk had two children with his own former stepdaughter. But the elder Mr. Musk said that he and his son were in frequent contact and that he had recently traveled to Texas to visit him and his children.

“I haven’t met one or two of them because they’re still secret,” the elder Mr. Musk said.

Mr. Musk, his attorney and the head of his family office did not return requests for comment. Representatives for Ms. Boucher did not return requests for comment. Ms. Zilis and Ms. Shanahan also did not return requests for comment.

All Musk’s Children​

Mr. Musk and his first wife, Justine Musk, had their first child, a boy named Nevada, in 2002, two years after they married. The child died unexpectedly in infancy.

“Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about Nevada’s death,” Justine Musk wrote in a 2010 essay. “I didn’t understand this, just as he didn’t understand why I grieved openly.” Ms. Musk wrote that she coped by “making my first visit to an I.V.F. clinic less than two months later.”

The couple had five children using I.V.F. before they divorced in 2008: twins, Griffin and Vivian, who are now 20, followed by triplets, Saxon, Damian and Kai, now in their late teens. Mr. Musk has said that I.V.F. is a more efficient way of having children because it allows parents to control parts of the process, according to a person who understands his thinking.

By 2016, as the head of Tesla and SpaceX, Mr. Musk had amassed a net worth of more than $11 billion, according to Forbes. That year, he warned for the first time on Twitter, the social network now known as X, that the world could be headed for population collapse.

“Consequences of population implosion greatly underestimated,” he wrote in response to an article about falling birthrates. In private, he had warned of the issue to his friends and family for years.

He twice married and divorced the actress Talulah Riley, whose desire to focus on her career instead of having children was a factor in their breakup, according to three people familiar with her thinking. Representatives for Ms. Riley didn’t return requests for comment.

In 2020, Mr. Musk and Ms. Boucher, whom he started dating two years earlier, had their first child, a son they named X Æ A-Xii, or X for short.

He started becoming even more vocal about the declining population. “Population collapse is 2nd biggest danger to civilization after AI,” he tweeted in July 2020, a couple of months after X’s birth.
Over the next few years, Mr. Musk had more children with Ms. Boucher as well as with Ms. Zilis. The arrangement created tensions that sometimes flared on social media.

In 2021, without Ms. Boucher’s knowledge, Mr. Musk donated sperm to Ms. Zilis, who became pregnant with twins through I.V.F., according to three people familiar with the couple. That same year, the billionaire and Ms. Boucher were expecting a second child also conceived via I.V.F. but carried by a surrogate.

The two women, who had been friends and ran in similar social circles, had unknowingly been at the same Austin hospital around the same time, according to an authorized biography of Mr. Musk by Walter Isaacson. Ms. Zilis had twins in late 2021, weeks before Ms. Boucher’s child, a girl, was born. Ms. Boucher found out that Mr. Musk had fathered Ms. Zilis’s children a month after they were born, according to two people close to the situation.

Further complicating matters, Mr. Musk took a name that he and Ms. Boucher had chosen for their daughter — Valkyrie — and gave it to one of Ms. Zilis’s twins, according to two people familiar with the naming. Ms. Boucher was so offended that she wrote a song about the episode, which she posted to Twitter.

“A girl cursed with my daughter’s name,” Ms. Boucher wrote in a now-deleted tweet, “will now carry her mother’s shame.” (In the end, Ms. Zilis changed her daughter’s name, while Ms. Boucher chose a different name for her child.)

By then, Ms. Boucher was living in Austin and co-parenting her children with Mr. Musk. Ms. Zilis was also living in the city, according to three people close to her.

Both women, at times, have treated Mr. Musk as their romantic partner, and backed his beliefs about a population crisis and having children to save humanity.

“I’ve spent most of my adult life working on what I figured would most contribute to a better future within the aperture of my skill set, but having kids makes it non-negotiably and viscerally obligatory to fight for that goal,” Ms. Zilis posted on X in March.

Fear of a Depopulated Planet​

Over the last three years, Mr. Musk has ratcheted up his alarm over the declining birthrate across the United States and elsewhere. In 2021, his foundation gave $10 million to the University of Texas to study fertility and population trends. He has posted at least 67 times on the subject since 2021, 33 of them in the last year.

“I’m doing my best to encourage more people to become parents and ideally have three or more kids, so humanity can grow,” he posted in February.

Mr. Musk has been celebrated by supporters of the growing pronatalist movement. While pronatalists on the Christian right believe children should be conceived through traditional marriages between a man and a woman, Silicon Valley adherents accept a wide array of family structures as well as reproductive technology like I.V.F.

Simone and Malcolm Collins, who founded the Pronatalist Foundation in 2021, have come to the movement from worry about demographic collapse and applaud what Ms. Collins called Silicon Valley’s “thinking about the future in a clearer way.” A married couple with four children, they said they were working for the betterment of humankind.

“Our worldview value is based around the goal of an eventual pluralistic intergalactic human civilization,” Mr. Collins said.

Few demographers believe the planet will face a catastrophic demographic event in the next few decades. The United Nations said in July that the global population, which is now eight billion, is expected to grow by two billion over the next 60 years, and then gradually fall by about 700 million people.

Nonetheless, a number of developed countries like Japan, Italy and Germany have been struggling to increase population as they face the economic consequences of a declining birthrate, like a shrinking work force and the costs of caring for the elderly.

“There is an awful morality to those who deliberately have no kids: they are effectively demanding that other people’s kids take care of them in their old age,” Mr. Musk posted on X in 2023, in response to a video of dual-income couples bragging about having no children.

In September, the pop star Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president, signing her Instagram post “Childless Cat Lady.” Mr. Musk posted on X, “Fine Taylor…you win…I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”

People close to Mr. Musk believe he was only half joking.
 
Nothing like preparing our youth for the ups and downs of life. Then again with that tuition fee, Mom & Dad have probably set up adequate trust funds for them...

One of New York City’s elite private schools told families on Thursday that “students who feel too emotionally distressed” the day after Election Day will be excused from classes, and that psychologists will be available during the week to provide counseling.

In a section of an email to members of the school’s community headed “Election Day support,” Stacey Bobo, principal of the upper school at the institution, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, said that it “acknowledges that this may be a high-stakes and emotional time for our community.”

“No matter the election outcome,” she wrote, the school “will create space to provide students with the support they may need.”

No homework will be assigned on Election Day, the email said, and no student assessments will take place on Wednesday. Excused absences will be allowed on Wednesday or whatever day the election results are announced for students who feel unable to “fully engage in classes.”

Gwen Rocco, a spokeswoman for the school, declined to comment on the email.

Fieldston’s upper school, in Riverdale, a leafy section of the Bronx, includes grades nine through 12. The school also has two elementary schools, one of which is in Manhattan, and a middle school on the Riverdale campus. About 1,700 students attend the schools, and tuition for all grades is $65,540 a year.
 
Roccus7 said:
Nothing like preparing our youth for the ups and downs of life. Then again with that tuition fee, Mom & Dad have probably set up adequate trust funds for them...

One of New York City’s elite private schools told families on Thursday that “students who feel too emotionally distressed” the day after Election Day will be excused from classes, and that psychologists will be available during the week to provide counseling.

In a section of an email to members of the school’s community headed “Election Day support,” Stacey Bobo, principal of the upper school at the institution, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, said that it “acknowledges that this may be a high-stakes and emotional time for our community.”

“No matter the election outcome,” she wrote, the school “will create space to provide students with the support they may need.”

No homework will be assigned on Election Day, the email said, and no student assessments will take place on Wednesday. Excused absences will be allowed on Wednesday or whatever day the election results are announced for students who feel unable to “fully engage in classes.”

Gwen Rocco, a spokeswoman for the school, declined to comment on the email.

Fieldston’s upper school, in Riverdale, a leafy section of the Bronx, includes grades nine through 12. The school also has two elementary schools, one of which is in Manhattan, and a middle school on the Riverdale campus. About 1,700 students attend the schools, and tuition for all grades is $65,540 a year.
Click to expand...
Honestly, how sad.
 
Roccus7 said:
Nothing like preparing our youth for the ups and downs of life. Then again with that tuition fee, Mom & Dad have probably set up adequate trust funds for them...

One of New York City’s elite private schools told families on Thursday that “students who feel too emotionally distressed” the day after Election Day will be excused from classes, and that psychologists will be available during the week to provide counseling.

In a section of an email to members of the school’s community headed “Election Day support,” Stacey Bobo, principal of the upper school at the institution, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, said that it “acknowledges that this may be a high-stakes and emotional time for our community.”

“No matter the election outcome,” she wrote, the school “will create space to provide students with the support they may need.”

No homework will be assigned on Election Day, the email said, and no student assessments will take place on Wednesday. Excused absences will be allowed on Wednesday or whatever day the election results are announced for students who feel unable to “fully engage in classes.”

Gwen Rocco, a spokeswoman for the school, declined to comment on the email.

Fieldston’s upper school, in Riverdale, a leafy section of the Bronx, includes grades nine through 12. The school also has two elementary schools, one of which is in Manhattan, and a middle school on the Riverdale campus. About 1,700 students attend the schools, and tuition for all grades is $65,540 a year.
Click to expand...
Back in the day, when I was an undergrad at Manhattan College in Riverdale, I took the N train to 42nd St and then took the #1 train to 242nd and Broadway. On the #1 train, many, many kids from the ritzy parts of Manhattan got on the train on their way to the Fieldston school. A sadder bunch of snowflakes you never met. I can just imagine the parents. And this was way back in the 60's.
 
Jaws1948 said:
Back in the day, when I was an undergrad at Manhattan College in Riverdale, I took the N train to 42nd St and then took the #1 train to 242nd and Broadway. On the #1 train, many, many kids from the ritzy parts of Manhattan got on the train on their way to the Fieldston school. A sadder bunch of snowflakes you never met. I can just imagine the parents. And this was way back in the 60's.
Click to expand...
Confirms what I was thinking.
 
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