Elon Musk’s ex says she turned down a $40M NDA — then her child support was cut to about $5M total. Was it all worth it?
Elon Musk’s ex says she turned down a $40M NDA — then her child support was cut to about $5M total. Was it all worth it?
Rudro ChakrabartiSun, October 18, 2026 at 7:35 PM UTC
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Ashley St. Clair says she was offered roughly $40 million to stay quiet about Elon Musk for good. She turned it down so she could tell her story.
In Musk, Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour documentary, the 28-year-old author and former conservative influencer describes what saying no cost her. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 8 and expanded to theaters nationwide on Oct. 16, a day after Musk was in Texas showing off Tesla’s new flying Roadster. St. Clair says the monthly child support she gets for their son, Romulus, now 2, fell to $20,000 — a fifth of the $100,000 a month she says Musk’s team offered if she signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA).
If the $20,000 rate held until Romulus turns 21, it would total about $5 million. By her account, the offer was worth about $40 million.
Musk, 55, denies ever making the offer. “She was never offered that and has a history of making false claims,” he wrote on X on Sept. 9, replying to a TMZ post about her Venice comments.
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Inside the offer she turned down
St. Clair first laid out the offer in a June interview with Don Lemon, which Moneywise covered at the time. She said it began when Musk messaged Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, to “wire Ashley 15 million for a home and reserve capital.” Birchall then told her there would need to be “some sort of NDA,” she said.
In the film, she says the paperwork “was labeled as a child support agreement” and offered “a lump sum of $15 million and then $100,000 a month for 20 years.” The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the offer in April 2025, said the monthly payments would run until Romulus turned 21. In exchange, St. Clair told Lemon she’d be barred from disparaging or speaking about Musk, his employees, or his affiliates “into eternity.”
According to the Journal, the deal had no trust fund or life insurance for their son if Musk died before the boy turned 21, and St. Clair would have had to pay back the $15 million if she broke it.
St. Clair has said she couldn’t sign it in good conscience and didn’t want her son to grow up feeling like a secret.
“I would rather go to a studio apartment with both my children than sign this,” she told Lemon.
From a $100,000 offer to $20,000 a month
St. Clair says the $100,000 figure was tied to the NDA. In the film, she says Musk cut payments to $40,000 a month after she refused to sign, then to $20,000 after she publicly revealed their son in February 2025.
The Journal’s 2025 reporting matches those amounts but not what set them off. It tied the drop to $40,000 to her court request for a paternity test, and St. Clair told the paper that Musk’s team sent her $20,000 after the Journal asked Musk for comment that April.
In March 2025, her attorney Karen Rosenthal told People that Musk had “financially retaliated against his own child and reduced his financial support substantially and unilaterally.” Days later, St. Clair sold her Tesla Model S, telling the Daily Mail she needed “to make up for the 60% cut that Elon made to our son’s child support.” When she launched a podcast that August, she said she was “getting evicted.”
She also says in the film that Musk was “kind” until Romulus was born. “It was almost as if he didn’t show a certain side of himself until after I had our baby,” she says.
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Musk’s side of the story
Musk’s dispute with her account goes back to March 31, 2025, when he posted on X that he didn’t know whether the child was his but was “not against finding out.” “Despite not knowing for sure, I have given Ashley $2.5M and am sending her $500k/year,” he wrote.
That works out to about $41,700 a month, in line with the $40,000 St. Clair says she was getting at that point. The $20,000 drop she describes came weeks later. The Journal also reported that Musk sent her $2 million during her pregnancy, structured as a loan.
A court-ordered paternity test put the probability that Musk is Romulus’ father at 99.9999%, according to the Journal. In January 2026, Musk posted that he would file for full custody, which Forbes described as an apparent public acknowledgment of the boy. The custody case is ongoing. Musk has 14 publicly known children.
Musk didn’t sit for the film, and he’s already written it off on X as a hit piece. His attorney, Alex Spiro, went further before the premiere, sending a letter to Gibney’s production company warning that the film defames him, NPR reported. That letter targeted a different scene, about Musk’s texts with St. Clair, not her NDA story. Gibney, for his part, says Musk turned down an interview.
Read More: Here’s the average income of Americans by age in 2026. Are you keeping up or falling behind?
The math behind it all
If you take the offer as the Journal reported, the $40 million figure checks out. She’d get $15 million upfront plus $100,000 a month until Romulus turns 21, which is 252 payments totalling $25.2 million, for about $40.2 million in all. That’s roughly 0.004% of the $908 billion Forbes estimated Musk was worth in September. Her current $20,000 a month over those same 252 months comes to about $5 million, leaving a gap of around $35 million.
The 20-year term she describes in the film doesn’t change the picture much. It brings the offer down to $39 million and her current payments to $4.8 million, shrinking the gap to about $34 million. It’s a rough comparison either way, since it assumes the payments never change and no judge steps in. It also leaves out the $2.5 million Musk says he’s already paid and the months St. Clair says she was receiving $40,000.
Taxes wouldn’t have taken a bite out of the monthly payments, since child support isn’t taxable to the parent who receives it, according to the IRS. The $15 million lump sum is less clear-cut, and how it would have been taxed depends on how the agreement was written.
Time is the bigger factor, because money paid out over two decades is worth less than the same amount in hand today. Assuming a 4% annual return, the $100,000 monthly payments are worth about $17 million in today’s dollars, which puts the full offer closer to $32 million. Her $20,000 payments work out to about $3.4 million on the same basis, so even in today’s dollars, the offer was worth roughly $29 million more than what she’s getting now.
Was it worth it?
St. Clair says it was — and that the money was never the point. “I want to set the example for my kids that you should never take being materially comfortable over speaking the truth,” she told reporters in Venice, according to Variety. To critics who call her a gold digger, she’s argued that she walked away from far more than she could ever earn by speaking out. Speaking out hasn’t been cheap, either. Her legal fees alone neared $250,000 by April 2025, the Journal reported.
The silence deals tied to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign were far smaller, and both women signed. That August, American Media Inc. paid former Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story about an alleged affair with Trump. She sued in 2018, and the company agreed to release her. Weeks before the election, Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to sign an NDA about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump, a deal she later fought in court. Federal prosecutors laid out both payments when Cohen was sentenced in December 2018, and Trump has denied both women’s allegations.
Would you have taken the $40 million and stayed silent?
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
