Elon Musk shared some painfully awkward small talk with Turkey’s president, with Erdoğan asking the unmarried billionaire how his wife is

• Elon Musk had an awkward moment when he brought his son X to a meeting with the Turkish president.
• Erdoğan asked Musk “Where is your wife?” in a meeting to discuss Starlink and Tesla in Turkey.
• X is one of three children Musk has with pop singer Grimes; they never married and are now separated.

Elon Musk shared an awkward moment with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as he brought his son X to a meeting with the Turkish president.

“Where is your wife?” asked Erdoğan, as the two men exchanged small talk. “Oh, she’s in San Francisco,” replied the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. “We’re separated, I take care of him mostly.”

X Æ A-12 Musk (X for short) is one of three children Musk has with Grimes in his on-again, off-again relationship with the pop singer. The couple said they were “semi-separated” in September 2021, but have remained close and have since had two more children.

X was born in May 2020, and his sibling Exa Dark Sideræl Musk (also known as Y) followed in 2021. The existence of their latest child, who is named Tau Techno Mechanicus, was revealed in a new biography of Musk.

Musk, who has been outspoken in his belief that people should have more children to prevent the world’s population from collapsing, now has 10 known children with three different women.

The meeting between Musk and Erdoğan took place at Turkish House, near the United Nations building in New York, with the Turkish president in town to attend the 78th General Assembly of the United Nations.

A statement from the Turkish directorate of communications said that Musk and Erdoğan had discussed making Starlink available in Turkey and the Turkish president also asked Musk to build a Tesla factory in the country.

The meeting came after X, formerly known as Twitter, was heavily criticized for restricting access to some content in the run-up to Turkey’s May general election in response to a request from the government.

Musk defended the decision at the time, saying that the company faced a choice between limiting access to some tweets or having “Twitter throttled in its entirety.”