The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of U.S.-Born Babies Via Surrogate — WSJ

Videogame executive Xu Bo, said to have more than 100 children, and other elites build mega-families, testing citizenship laws and drawing on nannies, IVF and legal firms set up to help them

Inside a closed Los Angeles courtroom, something wasn’t right. Clerks working for family court Judge Amy Pellman were reviewing routine surrogacy petitions when they spotted an unusual pattern: the same name, again and again. A Chinese billionaire was seeking parental rights to at least four unborn children, and the court’s additional research showed that he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more—all through surrogates.

When Pellman called Xu Bo in for a confidential hearing in the summer of 2023, he never entered the courtroom, according to people who attended the hearing. The maker of fantasy videogames lived in China and appeared via video, speaking through an interpreter. He said he hoped to have 20 or so U.S.-born children through surrogacy—boys, because they’re superior to girls—to one day take over his business. Several of his kids were being raised by nannies in nearby Irvine as they awaited paperwork to travel to China. He hadn’t yet met them, he told the judge, because work had been busy.

Pellman was alarmed, according to the people who attended the hearing. Surrogacy was a tool to help people build families, but what Xu was describing didn’t seem like parenting, the people said. The judge denied his request for parentage—normally quickly approved for the intended parents of a baby born through surrogacy, experts say. The decision left the children he’d paid for to be born in legal limbo.

The court declined to comment on Xu’s case. Xu, an online megaposter but real-life recluse, has rarely spoken with reporters and hasn’t been photographed in public for nearly a decade. A representative of Xu’s company, Duoyi Network, didn’t respond to specific questions about the hearing or Xu’s use of surrogacy. “The boss does not accept interview requests from anyone for any purpose,” the representative said in an email to The Wall Street Journal, adding that “much of what you described is untrue”. The representative, who didn’t provide a name, didn’t respond to repeated requests to clarify what was inaccurate.

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