Elon Wants YOU to Have More Babies

Even if you don’t write about Elon Musk for a living, you probably have some sense of his very public political tilt over the past few years. Musk, once a left-of-center capitalist known largely for his environmentalism, now regularly chats with Donald Trump and publicly amplifies a wide range of right-wing talking points and conspiracy theories, especially online. The guy’s almost got a checklist: border security, vaccine skepticism, pronoun jokes, red pilling, stop-the-stealing. Last fall he endorsed an antisemitic “replacement theory” trope, setting off a minor advertiser boycott. Name a mind virus, and he’s probably posting about it.

If you’ve paid unhealthily close attention, you may have also noticed another pattern. It’s become rarer and rarer for Musk to get through an interview or meet a world leader without bringing up babies, sometimes with his young son X in tow. In Musk’s mind, global fertility rates are not just a crisis, but the crisis. In 2022 he tweeted that “a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.” In 2023 he told Tucker Carlson, “Once you have birth control and abortions and whatnot, now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct but not procreate.” He added, “Will civilization end with a bang or a whimper? Well, it’s currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is depressing as hell.” He repeated a version of the adult diapers line in an interview with Michael Milken at the Milken Institute’s annual conference this past May.

To be clear: The world’s population is not declining. There were about 2 billion people living a century ago, and last year the number topped 8 billion, according to the US Census Bureau. The overwhelming majority of experts trust the data from the United Nations, which projects that the global figure will keep rising to a peak of more than 10 billion people by the year 2100. And even then, the consensus holds, we’re not talking about some collapse. What’s expected to follow the peak is a gradual, marginal decline in the population, not Children of Men.

Musk is correct that the overall rate of growth is slowing. The average person now lives someplace where more people are dying than being born. But rising immigration more than offsets those localized population declines in countries including the US and Canada. This trend is going to continue for mostly unscary reasons, says Jennifer Sciubba, a demographer and the author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World. While birth rates have lately begun to dip in places like India and Thailand, in general, the countries with shrinking numbers of babies are the rich ones where women are the most educated and kids are the most expensive. At the same time, factors such as access to birth control have led to dramatic declines in teen pregnancy. In light of all that, Sciubba says, “It’s interesting when you see certain folks lamenting how total fertility rates have gone down in the United States.”

The facts don’t seem to have put Musk’s mind at ease. He’s fathered at least 12 children, six of them in the past five years—three with the musician Grimes and three with Neuralink Corp.’s director of special projects, Shivon Zilis, including one who hasn’t been known to the public until now. That child was born earlier this year, according to people familiar with the matter, who would only discuss it on condition of anonymity. Zilis declined to comment, and Musk didn’t respond to inquiries.

Musk has become the richest and most powerful person who’s loudly of like mind with the pronatalist movement, a loose confederation of religious conservatives, libertarian techies and blogger bros. Most pronatalists say their priorities center around incentivizing parenthood economically and politically. In practice, some leading pronatalists oppose abortion and birth control, too, and have been known to fret about declines in the proportion of White Americans and advocate for the forcible reversal of that trend. “The pronatalist and the eugenic positions are very much not in opposition,” Kevin Dolan, the organizer of a pronatalist conference, said on a podcast last year. “They’re very much aligned.”

What this movement hasn’t had much of for many years is serious academic backing. Of late, however, pronatalist messages have made their way from the outer fringe into mainstream circles with the help of uncharacteristically quiet funding from the Musk Foundation. In 2021, not long after moving from California to Texas, Musk anonymously donated $10 million to the University of Texas at Austin, according to his foundation’s tax returns for that year. This donation, Musk’s largest ever to higher education, established a research group called the Population Wellbeing Initiative.

Publicly, PWI says its mission is “quantitative social science research.” Privately, it has said it aims to legitimize the idea that “low fertility is a key threat to long-run flourishing,” according to copies of emails reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek. (Businessweek obtained these and other email contents referenced throughout this story via public records requests.) PWI’s endowment is a rounding error to Musk, whose net worth of more than $200 billion was reaffirmed by Tesla Inc. shareholders last week with a vote to reinstate his 11-figure pay package. But it’s more than enough to distort the impact of research in the perennially underfunded field of demography.

PWI’s head, Dean Spears, is an economics professor with ties to effective altruism, the nouveau utilitarian philosophy that’s become a lingua franca in the technology industry. Housed in a four-story building on the west side of UT Austin’s campus, Spears and his team at PWI have churned out research papers, organized conferences and developed relationships with the wealthy and powerful. Their work has already begun to pay off. Over the past year, Spears has published an op-ed in the New York Times, signed a six-figure book deal with Simon & Schuster and announced that one of his researchers would be joining President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.

In an emailed statement, Spears didn’t address most of the specific claims in this story but stressed that PWI’s research on “if-then possibilities for how future birth rates might evolve” is peer-reviewed and rooted in the mainstream UN projections. He also said donors can’t buy him off. “For over a decade, my research has been funded by both government and philanthropic funders of scholarly research,” he said. “None of these research funders have the opportunity to influence the content, methodologies, or conclusions.” UT Austin representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Spears has kept himself and PWI at a certain distance from the pronatalist movement. Mainstream demographers, anthropologists and other experts who spoke with Businessweek say this is because the movement writ large is synonymous with junk science, the heir to a legacy of racism and eugenics espoused by earlier generations of dubious population researchers. Much of PWI’s research seems perfectly legitimate (“Animal Welfare: Methods to Improve Policy and Practice”), but its central works sound more like Musk’s tweets with subtitles, including “With a Whimper: Depopulation and Longtermism.” In an email, Spears called that one a “core PWI document.”

As PWI gains prominence in polite society, Musk’s “whacked-out ideas” on fertility are beginning to muddy the discourse around more credible research, says Leslie Root, a demographer and an assistant research professor in behavioral science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Already, Root says, conservatives have begun to cite declining fertility as a justification for new restrictions on abortion rights. Root’s Boulder colleague Amanda Stevenson, a demographer and assistant professor of sociology, says a panic could further stigmatize childless women and reduce access to birth control, too. “When we blame people for having too few children,” she says, “the political power of the people trying to restrict those things will become higher.”

In 1971, the year Musk was born in South Africa, there were about 3.8 billion people on the planet. Around this time, fertility rates in the US and other parts of the world fell as birth control became more readily available and feminist movements empowered more women to become financially independent. “We could celebrate having gotten to this point,” says Sciubba, the demographer, who’s also the chief executive officer of the Population Reference Bureau, a research nonprofit that works with the US Census Bureau.

That’s not to downplay the pernicious consequences of postwar fears about overpopulation. These were especially visible in the reactions to The Population Bomb, a megapopular book by Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich predicting that high birth rates would trigger the end of the world. (In an interview at the time, Ehrlich warned that the apocalypse would arrive as early as 1985.) Such fears helped lead to the one-child policy in China and campaigns of mass sterilization in places like Bangladesh and India. “This is the first global-scale population freak-out,” says Emily Merchant, an associate professor of science and technology studies at the University of California at Davis, who wrote a book about the panic and its consequences. In the US, Black women were targeted for involuntary sterilization surgeries well into the disco era. These so-called “Mississippi appendectomies” were generally conducted under some other pretext, Merchant says. “You go in for one thing, you come out sterilized.”

In other parts of the world, however, fears of underpopulation—a familiar trope of dystopian sci-fi—caused problems, too. To increase their country’s birth rate, Romania’s Communist leaders banned contraception and abortion in almost all cases in the 1960s. By the time the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was executed by firing squad on Christmas Day 1989, thousands of women had died from complications of illegal abortions, and Romania’s orphanages were crowded with abandoned children.

Economic downturns often lead to fewer kids. In the US, fertility rates still haven’t fully recovered from the Great Recession that ended in 2009. From 1990 to 2019, annual births in the US declined from about 4.1 million to 3.7 million, according to the census. Sciubba says the risk across countries is policymaking driven by irrational fear. “What’s interesting about demography is everybody knows a little something about it,” she says. “That can be a good thing, or it can be a bad thing if it’s fear motivated.”

Many of the roughly two dozen demographers, population researchers and other experts who spoke with Businessweek say you don’t have to squint hard to see the grim legacy of race science in Musk’s use of social media to amplify replacement theory and the like. Although this sort of thing can be easy to miss among his many edgelord routines—from the just-asking questions about vaccine science to the dick jokes he aims at the occasional US senator—pronatalism is the rare take that Musk is supporting with his money as well as his posts. (Then there are his alleged actions: Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that he asked one of his SpaceX staffers to have his babies, part of a pattern of Musk pursuing relationships with his employees, according to the Journal’s sources. In May, on the other hand, the Journal also quoted Spears in a panicky piece about population collapse.)

Taken at face value, Musk’s moar-babiez platform tracks with his interest in effective altruism. “This is a close match for my philosophy,” he tweeted in 2022 about What We Owe the Future, a book by leading effective altruist William MacAskill, a philosopher at the University of Oxford. The book argues that the welfare of future trillions of people outweighs that of today’s billions, and it became a pillar of PWI’s agenda, too. “We hope that so many excellent lives happen,” Spears wrote in the “core PWI document” that starts with a quote from MacAskill’s book. The main risk to that future, Spears wrote, is “only that people continue, for a few centuries, to have the sort of fertility rates that are now normal for most of humanity.”

For much of his career, Spears was an economist who spent his off-campus time in India with his wife, researching the health of kids in rural areas and the public-health impacts of open-air defecation. Everything about him screams mainstream academia: the glasses, the ruffled button-down, the disposition of someone who’s excited to jump up and draw on a whiteboard. Some of his earlier work, including a 2015 article titled “Smaller Human Population in 2100 Could Importantly Reduce the Risk of Climate Catastrophe,” suggested exactly what it sounds like. In the years that followed, Spears continued exploring population ethics, namely the question of whether more people is better than fewer people. He contributed to an essay collection co-edited by Hilary Greaves, a leading effective altruist at Oxford. He also began work on projects that indicated he’d reversed his thinking, including “With a Whimper” and a paper titled “A Larger World Population Yields Benefits That Exceed Climate Damages.”

In 2021, Spears and philosopher Mark Budolfson received a $383,000 grant to research population and climate change from Longview Philanthropy. Longview is an effective-altruism-aligned charity affiliated with MacAskill, Greaves and Liv Boeree, whose significant other, Igor Kurganov, co-ran the Musk Foundation around that time. Before the year was out, the foundation had anonymously given Spears and Budolfson the $10 million. In an unusual move, PWI and UT Austin have gone years without publicly acknowledging that Musk is their patron, except when Spears and other PWI researchers have published papers in journals that require authors to name their funders. Musk’s name appears in at least three of those.

According to emails, interviews and tax records, in 2022 Musk enlisted XTR, a newish production company in Los Angeles, to make a documentary about population decline. Without mentioning Musk’s name, XTR tapped Sindha Agha, an early-career director with experience creating educational, moving, visceral depictions of sexual and reproductive health and well-being that were popular as well as critically acclaimed. More than 12 million people watched Birth Control Your Own Adventure, her short film published by the New York Times that details the painful consequences of both her severe endometriosis and the medical establishment’s solutions for it. (The Emmy-nominated short opens, memorably, with a noisy squirt of ketchup on a paper plate representing Agha’s 11th birthday party, then recounts the depression, dysphoria, itchiness and other side effects the filmmaker experienced with different forms of birth control.)

XTR promised Agha total creative control but reneged when her proposal for the documentary focused on reasons for the declines that have their upsides, like education and birth control, according to interviews with three of the agency’s then staffers. In an email drafted to tell Agha she was out, XTR co-founder Kathryn Everett wrote that the film’s funder insisted that it “focus on an Austin-based professor’s perspective” in conjunction with the funder’s “big ideas for an accompanying dissemination impact campaign.”

The former XTR staffers confirmed that the funder was Musk; emails from a Musk staffer confirmed that the Austin-based professor was Spears. XTR co-founder Bryn Mooser, who’s close with Musk, declined to comment. So did Agha, citing a nondisclosure agreement.

While the documentary’s fate is unclear, Spears, now a tenured professor, hasn’t had much trouble making his voice heard. (The university’s tenure file notes his “success in securing external funding.”) Of frequent mention in Spears’ work today is the line on his favorite chart—time on the x-axis, population or fertility rates on the y-axis—which climbs into a sharp hump before spiking dramatically downward. A version of this chart has made its way into his papers and his New York Times op-ed, and it’s the basis for the title of his forthcoming book, After the Spike: Why Global Depopulation Is Coming Soon and What the Dwindling of Humanity Portends. Spears said in his emailed statement that the book will make “the case for respecting and supporting everybody’s free decision to parent or not to parent” and ask whether the world should target a stable population size. “Humanity needs a compassionate, factual and fair conversation about how to respond to depopulation,” he wrote in the Times last September. “The way to have that conversation is to start paying attention now.”

Geruso did indeed join the Biden administration, where he advises on health care and demography. The 2024 Economic Report of the President, to which Geruso contributed, cites three works by Spears, including his Times op-ed and the paper that it’s based on: “Long-Term Population Projections: Scenarios of Low or Rebounding Fertility.” Root, the assistant research professor, says the Times op-ed is “not good demography.” Geruso didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House.

In his emailed statement, Spears said he’s thinking very long term, exploring what might happen after 2100. Root and several other demographers say predictions that far out are bound to be unreliable. “Why should we assume that people in 200 years will be making the same childbearing decisions we make today?” asks Root.

In the meantime, pronatalists have been waiting impatiently for a more direct endorsement from Musk. This past December, in a hotel ballroom a 12-minute drive from PWI’s headquarters, attendees at the first Natal Conference shouted out Musk from the podium. “Elon Musk did like a tweet of mine the other day,” right-wing blogger Charles Haywood said during his speech about the need for male-only spaces and the uselessness of feminism. “My life is made.”

Natal was decidedly fringe. About 100 people gathered to hear speakers such as Brit Benjamin, a family lawyer with red hair down to her hips and a homemade sign reading “HAVE MORE BABIES,” blame no-fault divorces for declines in fertility. They also sat through a phoned-in speech by a blogger who goes by the handle Raw Egg Nationalist. The biggest names there were Simone and Malcolm Collins, an entrepreneur couple who use extensive genetic testing to hand-select their embryos. They gave a joint speech, with Malcolm in an ugly Christmas sweater and Simone in a tweed military jacket while pregnant with their fourth child. Both wore big smiles as they warned that low birth rates would guarantee doomsday. In a later phone interview, the Collinses stressed that pronatalists aren’t just a bunch of misogynists and White supremacists. “The conference was mostly good people who wanted what was best for the future of humanity,” says Malcolm. He and Simone have also denied claims that they’re eugenicists.

Musk didn’t show up. Nor did Spears or his team. Kathleen Broussard, a research fellow at PWI, wrote in an email that PWI had been planning to host its own conference the month before Natal but called it off in part because of “the optics.” Broussard also wrote that some people had “concern about being affiliated with our funding source.”

She wasn’t wrong. Root says she was unnerved to learn Musk had funded a PWI conference she attended in 2022. For years while she was a student, she whiled away free time trying to quash online misconceptions about what falling birth rates mean. (Ah, grad school.) Musk’s evangelism has made that task much tougher. Like her colleague Stevenson, Root worries about right-wing politicians seizing on unfounded population concerns to justify draconian laws. Shortly before the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, Louisiana Republican Representative Mike Johnson, now the speaker of the House, blamed abortion for economic challenges that he said could be solved with more people. “The lives of more than 63 million American children have been lost,” he said. “You think about the implications of that on the economy. We’re all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down.”

Around that time, Matt Schlapp, chair of the Conservative Political Action Conference, channeled population alarmism while arguing for criminalizing abortion to raise fertility rates. “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,” Schlapp told reporters during a CPAC gathering in Budapest a month before Roe v. Wade was struck down. In the two years since then, more than 20 US states have passed laws limiting access to abortion.

Spears appears to be aware of the line he’s toeing. At a mainstream demography conference last year, the annual meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA), a Spears co-author presented a paper they’d written with him on the subject of abortion and population. They concluded that pronatalists might be right or wrong that restricting abortion would increase birth rates, but that they’d hurt women either way.

Musk and some fellow doomsayers have warned that the pace of population decline appears to be getting worse, and faster, than most mainstream experts have predicted. Sciubba, of the Population Research Bureau, acknowledges that she expects the UN’s next population report to revise downward its expected peak, but she says none of this scares her. “What we try to do at PRB is steer fear away from the conversation and steer it more towards evidence,” she says. Other experts dismiss worries about population collapse as “folk notions of demography,” as Stevenson puts it. Stevenson says she’s less concerned about Musk’s money tainting demography research than she is about his megaphone drowning out the experts. Scientists are notoriously bad at communicating their findings to the general public, and fearmongering, she says, could easily fill the gap.

At PAA’s latest annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio, this past April, thousands of attendees in business casual shuffle to and from dozens of lectures with names such as “Contemporary Research on Migration” and “Fetal, Infant and Child Mortality.” Over and over, the researchers give thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for supporting their work. Here, regional fertility declines are mentioned more than a few times but rarely with fear. Stevenson is there, presenting her research on the relationship between restrictions on abortion and restrictions on birth control. PWI researcher Sangita Vyas is there, too, chairing a panel called “Implications of Long-Term Population Change for Environmental Outcomes, Economic Development, and Well-being.” Vyas declined to be interviewed at the conference and hasn’t responded to subsequent inquiries.

During a break in Columbus, Lyman Stone, the rare academic with a traditional demography background who’s also an avowed pronatalist, says no one in his religious conservative circles has been bringing up population decline as a reason to ban abortion. Still, he says abortion is an act of killing, and that he puts his demographic expertise to use consulting for anti-abortion groups that were involved in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe. Asked for his thoughts on restrictions akin to Ceaușescu’s in Romania, Stone says, “It was really bad, but it worked.” Although many women died, he says, illegal abortions were largely to blame.

Stone also says he’s shocked by PWI’s small footprint at the conference. “For all the money they have, I’m surprised they don’t have a booth,” he says, nodding in the direction of the setups from Oxford, the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Stone is also surprised to find out PWI doesn’t count itself as pronatalist. “They don’t?” he exclaims with a laugh.