No one can call Elon Musk a hypocrite with his calls for people to "have more children."
Musk himself is the father of 11 children with 3 different women. Two of his kids are with Shivon Zilis, an executive at one of his companies, Neuralink.
Zilis explains that Elon and her never actually dated, with the twins instead being conceived through IVF. For Zilis, the arrangement made sense as Musk told her "he really wants smart people to have kids."
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The concern of people not having enough children has been a consistent fear for Musk.
In 2022, he warned that "population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming," and just recently doubled down by posting on X that "America is trending towards extinction" in response to a post that the U.S. birth rate fell to its lowest level in a century.
While Musk fumes at those deciding to not have kids, even arguing to eliminate the voting rights for people without children, the data cites many other reasons couples don't have kids besides simply not wanting to.
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In a 2021 survey by Pew Research Center of non-parent American adults aged 18 to 49, 56% of respondents said their reason for not having kids was because "they just don't want to have children," while 43% cited "some other reason."
Of the "some other reason" demographic, 29% cited age, 23% cited medical reasons and 14% cited financial reasons.
It's possible Musk has grown out of touch with the cost of raising a child for the average American, with the cost of raising a child to 18 years old being close to a quarter of a million dollars before accounting for college costs.
With a net worth of around $191 billion, Musk can afford to father as many children as he wishes.
It should be noted, however, that not all demographers agree with Musk's doomsday assessment regarding a population collapse.
Author Tomas Sobotka, speaking at the Vienna Institute of Demography, attempted to calm concerns saying "with 8 billion people and counting on the earth, we don't see a collapse happening at present time, and it's not even projected."
Meanwhile, the United Nations projects the only regions that will see a population decline up to the year 2050 are in the already heavily populated eastern and southeastern Asia countries.
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