Billionaire Elon Musk is among a group of wealthy Westerners who are convinced the key to saving the planet is to load it down with an ever-increasing number of people. As The Guardian reports, these “pronatalists” insist that large families are the only solution to the doom they see ahead in which “There are going to be countries of old people starving to death.”
The movement claims to be logic-based and driven by data showing a decline in global birth rates. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk, who is a father of 11, believes “population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is another pronatalist who has invested millions in reproductive technology startups aimed at increasing human fertility.
“Of course, I’m going to have a big family,” Altman said. “I think having a lot of kids is great.” That’s a not-so-bold declaration from someone whose wealth means his children will never want for anything—including people hired to raise them.
But it’s hard to escape the feeling that this isn’t about saving civilization: It’s about extremely wealthy people who want to spread their genes to a maximum number of offspring and establish a kind of genetic elite on a planet that already has more than enough people.
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