“I will give you a child”

The exact weight of Swift’s endorsement in the national race is hard to gauge, but it was an emphatic statement from an influential superstar with an army of devoted fans. And it seems that at least one key Trump supporter, the ever-thirsty Elon Musk, thought he could work viral magic by responding to her with an offer of insemination. “Fine, Taylor,” Musk posted on X, the website he owns that continues to fester in the ruins of Twitter, “you win… I will give you a child and protect your cats with my life.”

Musk, who is known to have fathered 12 children and is currently in a custody battle with his ex-girlfriend Grimes over three of them, and has three more children with one of his employees at the brain-chip implant company Neuralink, has long stoked unfounded panic that Western countries are heading for “population collapse.” In 2022, he tweeted, “I’m doing my part haha,” regarding human reproduction. He has also amplified claims of the “Great Replacement” theory, a conspiracy theory that falsely claims that liberals and Jews are facilitating mass illegal immigration of people of color in order to turn white Westerners into a culturally oppressed minority.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO retweeted and responded to anti-Harris and anti-media posts on his platform during Tuesday night’s debate and in the hours that followed, while having little praise for Trump. He did, however, seem taken with the idea that the choice could come down to loyalty to him or Swift. In response to a tweet from an account that declared, “Oh my god, this has really become a choice between Elon and Taylor Swift now,” he posted his favorite laughing-crying face emoji. An hour later, Musk, whose recreational drug use and at times erratic behavior have troubled his companies’ leadership, tweeted his remark about impregnating Swift and protecting her cats.

An hour later, it had about 50,000 likes and nearly 10,000 replies ranging from disgust to approval. Neither Swift nor her boyfriend, NFL star and three-time Super Bowl winner Travis Kelce, responded to the offer.