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When Elon Musk's $40 Million Isn't Enough To Shut You Up

Ashley St. Clair rejected a staggering $40 million offer to stay silent about Elon Musk for a new documentary premiering this fall. Her decision to speak anyway reveals a billionaire so allegedly toxic that even eight-figure hush money couldn't work. And she's just the latest name on a very, very long list of people Musk has paid off.

Fact checked - 16 claims 11 Sept 2026 · 12 with sources

The math is brutal and telling. Ashley St. Clair, a 27-year-old conservative influencer and mother of one of Elon Musk's children, stood at a press conference in Venice on September 8, 2026, and told reporters she turned down $40 million to keep quiet about the world's richest man. That's more money than most people will see in ten lifetimes. That's generational wealth. That's never-work-again money. And she said no because, in her words, she wanted to teach her kids that you should never choose material comfort over speaking the truth. St. Clair appears prominently in Musk, a nearly four-hour documentary directed by Oscar-winner Alex Gibney that premiered at the Venice Film Festival this week to a standing ovation. The film opens in U.S. theaters on October 16, 2026. In it, she describes chilling encounters with Jared Birchall, Musk's so-called fixer and enforcer, a mild-mannered Mormon who runs Musk's family office and whose sole job, by his own admission, is to protect Elon. St. Clair refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement after her split with Musk, which gave her the freedom to speak on camera about a man she says told her they needed to have a legion of children before the civil war, a conflict she believes he's actively trying to provoke through his ownership of X. Musk, predictably, fired back on X, claiming St. Clair was never offered $40 million and has a history of making false claims. But the pattern of payoffs is well-documented and impossible to ignore. In 2018, SpaceX paid a flight attendant $250,000 to settle a sexual harassment claim after she accused Musk of exposing himself to her on a private jet and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for sexual favors. Musk denied the allegations, calling them a politically motivated hit piece. In 2025, Musk settled a lawsuit with four former Twitter executives he fired on day one of his takeover, a case seeking $128 million in severance. The settlement amount wasn't disclosed, but court filings from October 2025 confirmed the deal was done. Then there's the big one. In August 2025, Musk reached a tentative $500 million settlement with 6,000 former Twitter employees who said they were denied severance after mass layoffs following his 2022 acquisition of the platform. That's half a billion dollars to make a workforce shut up and go away. Add to that a $1.5 million SEC settlement in May 2026 over his delayed disclosure of Twitter stock purchases, a penalty so laughably small that the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, questioned whether the SEC had done enough to hold Musk accountable, even as she reluctantly approved the deal in July 2026. Musk also paid Donald Trump $10 million in February 2025 to settle a lawsuit over Trump's ban from Twitter after January 6, a figure Trump himself called a big discount. Director Alex Gibney, who has previously dissected corrupt power in films about Enron and Scientology, told the Associated Press he started the project as a kind of admirer but discovered Musk is not an inventor but an investor whose genius is stock pumping. Gibney said many people he approached for interviews were terrified to speak, citing a tremendous sense of fear among Musk's critics, colleagues, and friends. That fear makes sense when you consider the machinery behind the silence. Birchall, who serves as CEO of Neuralink and holds CFO roles at xAI and The Boring Company, doesn't just manage Musk's fortune. He arranges the loans, coordinates the layoffs, approves the expenditures, and apparently deploys the settlements that keep embarrassing stories out of the press. Eight former SpaceX employees sued Musk and the company in June 2024, alleging he personally ordered their firings after they wrote an open letter in 2022 complaining about rampant sexual harassment and what they called an Animal House work environment. The lawsuit accused Musk of running his company in the dark ages, treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size. SpaceX also settled a 2017 class-action lawsuit for $4 million with 4,100 employees who said they weren't given legally mandated rest breaks, with most workers receiving just $500 each. Tesla has faced a steady drumbeat of harassment and discrimination lawsuits, with eight filed in 2021 alone. In January 2025, Tesla's board returned more than $900 million in compensation to settle a shareholder lawsuit alleging directors overpaid themselves. The Dogecoin class-action lawsuit against Musk was dismissed in 2024 with no settlement paid. The sheer volume is staggering. Between federal securities violations, employment lawsuits, severance disputes, and personal settlements, Musk and his companies have been in a near-constant state of litigation for years. A Fortune analysis from August 2024 found Musk and his companies filed at least 23 federal lawsuits in the 13 months between July 2023 and August 2024 alone. One law professor told Fortune that Musk basically is just not afraid of suing on any grounds. But the flip side is equally true. He's been sued relentlessly, and his response is almost always the same: deny, attack, delay, and eventually write a check to make it go away, often with an NDA attached.

My Take

Here's what should terrify you: Ashley St. Clair walked away from $40 million because the alternative, staying silent, felt worse. Think about what kind of person you have to be for someone to make that calculation. Musk has spent years cultivating a public image as a visionary, a disruptor, a meme-lord who's saving humanity with electric cars and rocket ships. But peel back the mythology and you find a man who allegedly proposition flight attendants for horses, fires employees who complain about sexual harassment, and deploys a fixer to muscle former partners into silence. The documentary paints Musk not as a modern Leonardo da Vinci but as a 21st-century confidence man who treats everyone around him like non-player characters in a video game. St. Clair says Musk told her they needed to breed a legion of children before the civil war, and that he's actively stoking division on X to create the chaos he imagines is coming. That's not eccentricity. That's dangerous messianic delusion backed by $900 billion in net worth and zero accountability. The fact that he can throw around $40 million offers like party favors and still face no real consequences, legal or otherwise, tells you everything you need to know about how power actually works in America. And let's be clear: the settlements aren't evidence of guilt, legally speaking. Musk denies most of these allegations and rarely admits wrongdoing. But when you're writing checks to flight attendants, ex-girlfriends, former executives, and thousands of laid-off workers on a near-monthly basis, at some point the pattern speaks for itself. The only question left is how many people has he paid off that we don't know about? How many signed the NDAs and took the money and disappeared? St. Clair's refusal to do that is remarkable, but she shouldn't have to be remarkable. She should be ordinary. The fact that turning down hush money makes her a hero says everything about the rot at the center of this story.

What Happens Next

Musk opens in U.S. theaters on October 16, 2026, distributed by Bleecker Street, with a wider rollout on October 23. Expect Musk to wage an all-out war on the film through X, where he's already called Gibney a douchebag and incredibly biased and accused him of making a hit piece. The documentary will almost certainly spark new scrutiny of Musk's business practices, his treatment of women, and the extent of his political influence, especially given his deep ties to the Trump administration and his role in federal cost-cutting efforts. St. Clair's willingness to go on the record without an NDA may embolden others who've been silenced by Musk's legal apparatus. If even one person who signed a settlement breaks ranks or finds a legal way around their non-disclosure agreement, the floodgates could open. The $500 million Twitter severance settlement is still being finalized, with payments expected to be distributed in the coming months. And Musk's $56 billion Tesla compensation case is headed to the Delaware Supreme Court after two losses before Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, with a final appeal decision expected late in 2026. The bigger question is whether any of this will actually hurt Musk. His net worth keeps climbing. His companies keep launching rockets and selling cars. Politicians on both sides still court his favor and his money. A damning four-hour documentary and a brave ex-girlfriend might make headlines for a week, but unless regulators, prosecutors, or shareholders decide they've had enough, Musk will likely do what he's always done: deny, deflect, and write another check. The real test will be whether the public finally sees past the myth and demands accountability, or whether we've already decided that being the richest man alive means you can buy your way out of anything.

What History Tells Us

The playbook Musk is using, silencing critics and accusers with cash and NDAs, is as old as wealth itself. Harvey Weinstein deployed it for decades until the dam broke in 2017. Jeffrey Epstein used it. So did the Catholic Church during its sexual abuse scandals, the subject of one of Gibney's earlier films. What makes Musk's version distinct is the scale and the shamelessness. He's not hiding in the shadows. He's the most visible billionaire on the planet, posting hundreds of times a day on the platform he owns, and still managing to keep vast swaths of his personal conduct buried under legal settlements. The Gilded Age robber barons, Carnegie and Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, faced similar accusations of exploiting workers and crushing critics, but they operated in an era before social media, before real-time fact-checking, before documentaries could premiere to global audiences at film festivals. Musk is conducting the same playbook in broad daylight, betting that spectacle and memes and rocket launches will drown out the ugly details. So far, that bet has mostly paid off. But history also teaches us that every untouchable empire eventually finds its limit, and it's often one person saying no, like St. Clair, that starts the collapse.