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?

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.

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.

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.