Ashley St. Clair boasted that she had Elon Musk “wrapped around her finger” and could get him to “retweet anything” while promising fellow conservatives access to the world’s richest man, multiple sources told The Post.
But when asked to use her paramour to help boost a right-wing cause last year, St. Clair failed to do so and then ghosted the party who made the request, the sources said.
Conservative insiders who have known St. Clair, 26, for years claim that she rose to prominence on the backs of fellow members of the movement — before casting her erstwhile friends aside in an attempt to become Musk’s “permanent side piece,” as one source put it.
“You could never necessarily trust her because you might not be doing what she could monetize or what she could sensationalize in order to make her own star rise,” said a source who has known St. Clair since 2017. “She’s always kind of wanted to be a kept woman, as far as I can see — she was always chasing that.”
“Movements are never about one individual,” the source added. “She just kind of tagged along with it. I don’t know if she’s even rooted in a conservative type of philosophy. I think it’s just what made her money.”
After her affair with Musk began in 2023, St. Clair — who has 1.1 million followers on X, and whose posts regularly rack up more than 1 million views — offered to help conservative messages gain a wider audience, according to a second source familiar with her proposition.
The upstart social media maven had gotten the Tesla and SpaceX boss to interact with several of her posts over the course of that year — including a simple “wow” in response to a December 2023 viral video that showed St. Clair accusing Delta Air Lines of flying recently detained illegal migrants from Arizona to New York.
Early in 2024, the second source told The Post, they engaged with St. Clair on behalf of a third party about performing a similar stunt. At the time, this person said, St. Clair was openly bragging about her closeness to Musk.
However, the source said, St. Clair never undertook the job, claiming in a text conversation seen by The Post that she had to go to Europe instead. She also refused to meet with the third party who requested the message boost.
“People have discussions, and they don’t result in a deal,” a rep for St. Clair said when approached for comment by The Post. “But you want to write about that as though it’s some kind of wrongdoing, which is absolute nonsense.”
The incident occurred after St. Clair claims she conceived Musk’s 13th child during a January 2024 trip to St. Barths.
This past Friday, St. Clair revealed that fact when filing two petitions in Manhattan Supreme Court to legally declare Musk the father of her child and gain sole custody of her 5-month-old son. The billionaire has not publicly acknowledged paternity of the child.
The revelations prompted MAGA influencers to release purported text messages from May 2023 in which St. Clair talked about wanting to “seduce elon [sic]” and bear his “rocket babies.”
“Whoa!” Musk replied to influencer Isabella Moody’s X post with millions of views exposing the communications.
St. Clair burst onto the right-wing influencer scene in 2019, when she confronted lefty protesters who raised a Mexican flag at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Aurora, Colo. She later made headlines again for being physically assaulted at a December 2019 rally in Colorado Springs calling for the 45th president’s impeachment.
“She was very opportunistic, she was very eager,” the first source recalled of St. Clair’s salad days, “and that to me said, ‘Is she really in this for the right reasons?’”
Since St. Clair came forward as the mother of Musk’s child in a Valentine’s Day X post, MAGA loyalists have called into question her conservative commitments on everything from securing America’s borders to fighting back against feminism to embracing child-rearing and family values.
“[She would embrace] whatever issue was the issue du jour,” the first source added.
St. Clair was part of the conservative activist group Turning Point USA and was briefly a brand ambassador until a photo of her appearing with white nationalist and antisemitic content creator Nick Fuentes — as well as far-right conspiracy theorists Jacob Wohl and Ali Alexander — led to her firing in October 2019.
She later authored the 2021 children’s book “Elephants Are Not Birds,” first published by a conservative imprint, that she said she put out as a provocative response to growing transgender acceptance.
“She’s got a wit about her too,” the first source said of St. Clair. “She’s a smart woman.”
While writing for the Babylon Bee, a satirical conservative website, in the early 2020s, St. Clair was thrust into the center of a raging debate over free speech and cancellation, which eventually led to a fateful rendezvous with the tech billionaire.
Prior to Musk taking over X, the Bee had been banned from Twitter — as it was then known — for posting a joke about a transgender public health official in the Biden administration. St. Clair met Musk at the app’s HQ in San Francisco after he took over in a $44 billion transaction finalized in late 2022.
The initial May 2023 meeting was followed by a romantic getaway in Providence, Rhode Island, according to St. Clair.
By 2024, St. Clair was claiming in right-wing influencer circles that Musk was looping her in on content moderating decisions on X, a third source with direct knowledge of the conversations told The Post.
Around the same time, she was believed to be a growing “liability” by “major conservative influencers,” according to the second source.
The Post has reached out to representatives for Musk and X for comment.
St. Clair previously told The Post that Musk, 53, has already paid for a security detail and put her up in a glitzy apartment in Manhattan’s Financial District — where two-bedroom units are rented out for almost $40,000 a month, per StreetEasy — but refuses to acknowledge the alleged love child she bore last September.
Conservatives have said St. Clair’s trajectory from humble financial means to ritzy digs in Manhattan has made them feel spurned at times — a feeling reinforced with every social media post of herself at Mar-a-Lago or elsewhere in the upper echelons of GOP power.
“She was always looking for someone that might be more important,” the first source said, describing her outlook as: “What was in it for Ashley? Not necessarily what was in it for the [conservative] movement.”
“A lot of people do this for nothing,” this person added. “They’re trying to make a living out of doing what is right.”
