Elon Musk loves children. No, most likely not like that, he’s only a large fan of having plenty of children — as long as they don’t go having opinions of their very own, that’s. In actual fact, Musk loves children a lot that he thinks you ought to have one. Have just a few. Have a bunch, even. Simply, be sure to’re the kind who ought to be having children first.
That is, successfully, the driving thought behind the Inhabitants Wellbeing Initiative, a undertaking out of the College of Texas at Austin that Musk established with a $10 million donation. It’s the thought behind Musk’s fixed delivery price alarmism on social media, a subject he’s even paired with the racist “nice alternative” concept. A new Bloomberg report exhibits simply how deep Musk’s ties to the pronatalist motion go:
Should you’ve paid unhealthily shut consideration, you will have additionally seen one other sample. It’s grow to be rarer and rarer for Musk to get by way of an interview or meet a world chief with out mentioning infants, generally along with his younger son X in tow. In Musk’s thoughts, world fertility charges usually are not only a disaster, however the disaster. In 2022 he tweeted that “a collapsing delivery price is the largest hazard civilization faces, by far.” In 2023 he advised Tucker Carlson, “After getting contraception and abortions and whatnot, now you may nonetheless fulfill the limbic intuition however not procreate.” He added, “Will civilization finish with a bang or a whimper? Effectively, it’s at the moment attempting to finish with a whimper in grownup diapers, which is miserable as hell.” He repeated a model of the grownup diapers line in an interview with Michael Milken on the Milken Institute’s annual convention this previous Might.
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The info don’t appear to have put Musk’s thoughts comfortable. He’s fathered a minimum of 12 kids, six of them up to now 5 years—three with the musician Grimes and three with Neuralink Corp.’s director of particular tasks, Shivon Zilis, together with one who hasn’t been identified to the general public till now. That baby was born earlier this 12 months, based on individuals aware of the matter, who would solely talk about it on situation of anonymity. Zilis declined to remark, and Musk didn’t reply to inquiries.
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In 2021, not lengthy after transferring from California to Texas, Musk anonymously donated $10 million to the College of Texas at Austin, based on his basis’s tax returns for that 12 months. This donation, Musk’s largest ever to increased training, established a analysis group known as the Inhabitants Wellbeing Initiative.
Publicly, PWI says its mission is “quantitative social science analysis.” Privately, it has stated it goals to legitimize the concept that “low fertility is a key risk to long-run flourishing,” based on copies of emails reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek. (Businessweek obtained these and different e mail contents referenced all through this story through public data requests.)
Musk’s aim, by way of PWI, is to encourage increased delivery charges in hopes of stemming some type of sudden inhabitants collapse — a collapse that scientists largely agree is unrealistic bordering on unimaginable. His intense deal with such an unlikely consequence isn’t with out precedent, nonetheless: With Musk’s ties to the Moral Altruist motion in thoughts — a hyperlink Bloomberg additionally famous — this fear-based strategy echoes the EA strategy of longtermism.
Moral Altruism is an offshoot of utilitarianism, centered on doing the best good for the best variety of individuals — particularly, how wealthy individuals can finest donate their cash to empirically assist extra individuals, moderately than specializing in causes they merely care about. The longtermist view expands to cowl potential future individuals inside that utilitarian viewpoint, arguing that they deserve safety most of all, and that one thing that threatens all of them — regardless of how unlikely, like the parable of inhabitants collapse — should be fought towards in any respect prices. Abigail Thorn has a fantastic description:
But, regardless of its EA roots, Musk’s pronatalist strategy — the one he’s spending all this cash on — doesn’t look like designed for all future individuals. One want solely look to Musk’s lengthy–working fandom of eugenics–comedy Idiocracy (the 2000s have been a bizarre time) to see that he cares about what sorts of individuals inherit the earth. Bloomberg talks concerning the eugenics of pronatalism in broad strokes, declaring that the motion usually bends towards preserving particular races or traits, however we are able to look to Musk’s historical past to theorize about his private desired outcomes. From Mom Jones:
[Mother Jones journalist Garrison Hayes] zeroes in on a particular phenomenon: Musk is amplifying customers who will incorporate cherry-picked information and deceptive graphs into their argument as to why individuals of European descent are biologically superior, displaying how fringe accounts, like consumer @eyeslasho, expertise a drastic soar in followers after Musk shares their tweets. The @eyeslasho account has even thanked Musk for elevating “consciousness” in a thread final 12 months. (Neither @eyeslasho nor Musk, through X, responded to Garrison’s request for an interview.)
“Persons are nearly extra inclined to less complicated charts with race and IQ than they’re to the actually difficult stuff,” Will Stancil, a lawyer and analysis fellow on the Institute on Metropolitan Alternative, advised Garrison in a video interview. He added: “That is probably the most primary statistical error within the ebook: Correlation doesn’t equal causation.”
Musk has lengthy held the concept that C-sections lead to increased intelligence — a concept refuted by scientific research — however there’s extra to his beliefs than that. In these similar tweets, Musk ties “assortative mating” to “an enormous rise in exceptionally sensible individuals” — assortative mating being the tendency for like to draw like.
Elon Musk believes individuals ought to have extra infants. He believes these infants must be sensible, and he believes that’s finest achieved by way of individuals breeding with others like them — within the phrenological sense. He believes that this effort is of world-saving significance, and believes it’s price tens of millions of {dollars} in monetary backing. Is that this somebody you wish to purchase a automotive from?
