Last week, reports surfaced that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has quietly fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at one of his companies, Neuralink. The birth of two more Musk babies in November 2021 means that the richest man in the world has now fathered 10 children in total.
More alarmingly though, he thinks everyone else should too.
“I hope you have big families and congrats to those who already do!” he tweeted on Friday. “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” he wrote shortly after the news of his latest children broke. “Mark my words, they are sadly true.”
This isn’t the first time Musk has mentioned his fear of a population apocalypse. At a Wall Street Journal event in 2021, he again warned the world about the perils of small families: “There are not enough people…I can’t emphasise this enough, there are not enough people,” he said.
He also added that too many “good, smart people” think the earth is overpopulated. “It’s completely the opposite,” he continued. “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.”
Musk has long been celebrated as a poster boy for the liberal right and its obsession with reproduction is not new.
Only two weeks ago the US Supreme Court – which has a majority conservative Republican makeup – rolled back the reproductive rights of women across America. On 24 June, the court overruled Roe v Wade, restricting abortions in some states or criminalising it altogether.
This is set against a backdrop of growing far-right population anxiety. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson said the low birth rate – the US birth rate reached record lows in 2019 – was because women are “too focused on working,” while personally telling off young women live on air who said they didn’t want children.
Elsewhere around the world, this narrative has also emerged as a far-right talking point: in 2019, the Christchurch shooter murdered 51 people in a mosque. His chilling manifesto was titled the “Great Replacement Theory”. It began with the words: “It’s the birth rates.”
Popularised by Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Replacement, followers of this theory fear that white people will become outnumbered, in countries like the US, and replaced by growing populations of ethnic minorities. According to a YouGov poll, 61 per cent of Trump voters and 53 per cent of Fox News viewers fear this to be true.
While Musk has never publicly supported Camus’ far-right conspiracy theory, his normalisation of a “birth-rate” crisis is only adding fuel to an increasingly confident movement, one that is obsessed with keeping white families in the majority.
Earlier this month an article by Dr Paul Morland, demography researcher, was published in The Sunday Times, in which he explained that it was vital to encourage families to have children sooner so that there will be enough “tanker drivers and care-home assistants”. In it, he wrote that “we should adopt a ‘grow our own’ policy, aiming to provide most of the population growth from births within our racially and ethnically diverse country rather than immigration”.
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Instead of addressing the extortionate cost of childcare , Morland suggested incentives such as the Queen sending parents a telegram once they have their third child. Morland’s airy disregard for the actual realities of child rearing has an echo in Musk’s hand-off approach. Musk previously told Time magazine that he was less involved in his children’s early years than their mothers – “When the kid gets older, there will be more of a role for me.”)
While these conversations pushing for more babies continue, few address the real reasons many might be put off having children – nearly half of childless 18 to 24 year olds said they feared never be financially secure enough to start a family and the Child Poverty Action Group, the cost of raising a child in 2021 could be as much as £71,611. Not to mention the environmental impact in the face of the ongoing climate crisis.
Although Roe v Wade impacts the US, on this side of the pond we should not be complacent about the growth of “birth crisis” narrative and right-wing figures discussing abortion rights. Jacob Rees Mogg, the Catholic father of six children, has told parliament he is not in favour of the morning after pill or “abortifacients” as he described them.
Under the guise of a declining birth rate, the right seems increasingly emboldened to speak out on the reproductive rights of women. And so Musk’s obsession with “population disaster” should worry us all.
While Musk congratulates himself for producing two more children, seemingly at minimal cost to his own career, perhaps the pressure to change shouldn’t be directed at women, but at a completely broken system.
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