California Surrogate Learns From CBS News She's Carrying Child for Billionaire With Reported 100-Plus Kids

LOS ANGELES — A California surrogate says she only learned the true identity of the man whose child she was carrying after CBS News journalists connected her pregnancy to Xu Bo, a reclusive Chinese gaming billionaire whose former partner has alleged he has fathered as many as 300 children through surrogacy arrangements in the United States.

The surrogate, identified only as Judy to protect her privacy, told CBS News she was roughly 12 weeks pregnant when reporters informed her that leaked documents identified Xu, founder of Guangzhou-based gaming company Duoyi Network, as the intended father. "Do I even have a right to know?" Judy said, describing her reaction after learning more about the scale of the family arrangement she had unknowingly become part of.

According to Judy's account, she responded to an Instagram advertisement offering £88,839, or roughly $120,000, for a surrogacy arrangement. As a single mother raising a seven-year-old daughter, she said the payment appeared to offer a path toward greater financial stability and eventually a home of her own. After being matched through the agency Patriot Conceptions, which CBS reported lists Haotian Bai as its founder, Judy said she was told the intended parent was a single father hoping to expand his family. She said she grew curious about whether other women were carrying children for the same man and was told the number was close to two dozen.

CBS News' investigation, which the outlet said involved interviews with 32 surrogates along with a review of contracts and court documents, ultimately connected Judy's pregnancy to Xu through leaked paperwork. Judy said she felt blindsided by the revelation and had repeatedly tried, without success, to arrange a meeting with the man for whom she was carrying the child.

The scale of Xu's family has become the subject of disputed and evolving public claims. His former partner, Tang Jing, who is currently engaged in a custody and financial dispute with Xu in China, has publicly alleged he may have as many as 300 children. Duoyi Network has pushed back on that figure. Following a December 2025 Wall Street Journal investigation into Xu's surrogacy arrangements, the company acknowledged that years of effort through U.S. surrogacy had produced what it described as "only a little over 100" children. In a separate statement cited by CBS, Xu disputed the larger estimates and said he has custody of 12 children born through surrogacy in the United States specifically.

Tang Jing has said separately that she helped raise 13 of Xu's children in Japan, including two she described as their shared biological daughters and 11 others born through surrogacy, and that she is currently raising 11 of the children amid the ongoing custody dispute. She has said the broader group of children live across properties in multiple countries. Xu himself is reported to live in China and has been described as a recluse who is not directly involved in day-to-day parenting of the children.

Xu has posted an image on a social media account linked to him showing more than 100 young children seated in rows. A Chinese-language statement attributed to Xu accompanying similar posts said that "more children bring more blessings" and that he hoped his actions would contribute to what he described as China's long-term development.

The Wall Street Journal's earlier investigation additionally reported on court proceedings tied to Xu's surrogacy arrangements, including petitions filed over parental rights involving unborn children, and found that a California judge had encountered multiple such applications while Xu was in the process of fathering additional children through separate surrogacy arrangements around the same time. The Journal reported separately that Xu had discussed wanting children born in the United States who could eventually take over his business, though that reported ambition remains attributed specifically to the Journal's own sourcing rather than an independently confirmed statement from Xu himself, particularly given the range of competing accounts surrounding his family circumstances.

Judy told CBS she continued with the pregnancy after signing her surrogacy agreement because she needed the income, saying friends and relatives encouraged her to proceed despite her growing concerns. Those concerns, as described in CBS's reporting, centered less on the pregnancy itself than on what she viewed as a lack of transparency from the agency about the intended father's identity and broader family circumstances before she committed to the arrangement. "I feel blindsided. I feel misled," Judy said of learning the full picture only after becoming pregnant.

The revelations have prompted a wide range of reactions online, though such reactions reflect individual opinions rather than independently verified findings about Xu or the legality of his surrogacy arrangements. Some social media commentary has focused on the reported scale of the arrangements, while other commentary has called more broadly for greater transparency and stronger regulatory safeguards within the commercial surrogacy industry. None of that reaction establishes that Xu violated U.S. law or that he deliberately exploited legal loopholes; the underlying reporting instead centers on Judy's firsthand account, documents linking Xu to her pregnancy, and the broader, still-disputed questions about exactly how many children have been born through his surrogacy arrangements and how those arrangements have been disclosed, or not disclosed, to the women carrying them.

Every child born in the United States is automatically granted U.S. citizenship at birth under current law, a legal framework that has drawn its own scrutiny in the context of large-scale international surrogacy arrangements like those reported in Xu's case, even as questions specific to his family circumstances, and the surrogates involved in carrying his children, remain the subject of ongoing reporting and disputed public claims from those closest to the situation.