Elon Musk is really hard to sum up in one sentence—on one hand, he changes the world with engineering thinking, and on the other, he builds his family with the same logic.

In business, he has created SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, Neuralink… each redefining an industry. Rocket recovery, widespread electric vehicles, brain-machine interfaces—just one of these could be enough for an ordinary person to boast about for a lifetime.

In family, his domain is also quite “systematized”: according to publicly available information, he has at least 14 children with multiple partners. Some joke that he pursues “scale and efficiency” in having children just like building rockets—natural conception as well as surrogacy; children within marriage and outside of relationships.

Most interestingly, he directly applies the “first principles,” “long-termism,” and “from one to system” concepts from his business to family building. While others rely on fate and feelings to form families, he seems to be designing a “life continuation system.”

Of course, this approach also sparks quite a bit of controversy. Some admire his consistency and how he treats both career and life with engineering logic; others believe that family and company are ultimately different, and that emotions and responsibilities $DOGE cannot be managed with KPIs.