There is so much jaw-dropping weirdness in the Wall Street Journal report about Elon Musk's apparent baby-making fetish. Musk reached out to random women he's never met and asked to impregnate them. He bribed women to have babies with hints of massive paydays, but then reneged on the deal when they asked for normal father behavior, like acknowledging paternity. He demanded one baby mama have a C-section because he thinks vaginal delivery shrinks baby brains. He wanted to hire a fleet of surrogate mothers, so he could build a "legion" of children by keeping many women pregnant at once. And low-key what made me laugh hardest, Musk texted a right-wing influencer he'd knocked up with, "Men are made for war. Real men, anyway," which he followed up with, "I am in full war mode. Going to the front lines today. Must win PA." (He was referring to his speech at a campaign rally for Donald Trump.)

Musk's behavior is a symptom of a growing problem in the MAGA world: The obsession with masculinity, fueled by social media, is getting stranger.

But what struck me — and often strikes me in the coverage of Musk's spiral into a total crank — is how the richest man in the world seems lonely. He's alienated from normal human interaction, which unmoored him from reality. He's trying to build a compound in Austin, Texas, "where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences," like he's a polygamist Mormon in the Warren Jeffs mode. But it seems he has few, if any, takers to live near him. His interactions with the women and their children seem mostly through lawyers and his financial manager. He keeps one small son around all the time, but calls him an "emotional support human," as if he's an object and not a child. Musk has over a dozen kids, but doesn't seem to have a family.

As many liberals predictably rushed forward to point out, it's hard to square Musk's behavior with his hero status on the........

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