Elon Musk’s four-year-old son blended in perfectly in the Oval Office with all the other bogeymen | Catherine Bennett

Regardless of anxiety by most parents about over-sharing, the president’s aide brought one of his children to the White House

If the reversal of declining birthrates is genuinely a preoccupation of Elon Musk’s, recent reviews suggest that the exhibition of his four-year-old son, “X”, may not be the most effective fertility stimulus.

That there is more chance of the exact opposite, a global stampede for contraceptives, remains likely even if X can be persuaded not to pick his nose and, as the world witnessed last week, idly consume its contents beside the US president’s Resolute desk. I say “idly”. Donald Trump, in attendance, introduced X as “a high IQ individual”. Behind his show of mucoid innocence, the prodigy may have been reflecting, with wry amusement at the double standards, that no woman in his father’s role would get away with bringing a docile child to a presidential press conference, still less one as irksome as himself.

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