Elon Musk and the Billionaire Baby Boom
28:56 Share

Get started now at Bluehost.com.

Have you ever spotted McDonald's hot crispy fries right as they're being scooped into the carton? And time just stands still. I really do have a concern that women's place in society is going to change in the next few years.

Elon Musk has been in the news this week after it was revealed that he fathered his 13th child with right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair. Musk, like many Silicon Valley billionaires, has begun posting incessantly about the need to have children, speaking about declining birth rates and railing against childlessness.

It's all part of a movement called pro-natalism, which is gaining traction in elite Silicon Valley circles. My guest today, Julia Black, is a reporter at The Information and has covered this movement extensively. We're going to talk about what pro-natalism is, how it's affecting our political landscape, and why all of these billionaires are trying to have dozens of children. Julia, welcome to Power User. Thanks so much, Taylor. So good to see you. So I wanted to talk to you because I feel like you're the expert on...

All of this crazy kind of obsession that Silicon Valley has had lately with having babies and families and I guess the rise of what's called natalism. Can you define what natalism or pronatalism means? Pronatalism or natalism is the idea that due to declining birth rates, one supports the idea of having more and more children.

And in this particular incarnation that we're seeing and that we've seen many times throughout history, actually, there's usually a focus on a particular group of people who should be having these extra children. When did Silicon Valley people become so obsessed with this idea? Like what first drew them into this movement and when did that happen?

that happen? It certainly first came to my attention in 2021. And I think that is the first time you started to see any of this stuff trickle out from kind of behind the scenes. There is actually evidence that Elon Musk, who is the first person I discovered having an interest in this has had this interest for years, like since the 2000s, when he was with his first wife, Justine, once he kind of came out of the shadows, came out as a pro natalist,

It really started to catch on and now we're at the point where it seems like every other day I'm going online and seeing some new tech founder, CEO type coming out as a pronatalist. Just the other day, Palmer Luckey gave an interview where he

proudly identified as a pronatalist. I saw that. Does he have children? I didn't realize. I don't think he has children, but that's something I should fact check. But there are many cases of people in Silicon Valley who actually don't have children, but still identify with this almost as like a political belief. Okay, so Elon kind of kicked off the movement, but how did other people get on board? And why is this pronatalist kind of belief system so enticing to Silicon Valley founders and billionaires?

Yeah, so again, I mentioned that this is the kind of thing that we've seen throughout history. You see pronatalism emerge typically in moments of kind of national crisis, and it often goes hand in hand historically with the rise of authoritarianism.

So I think it is no coincidence that we're seeing what many would call kind of an American decline. There's a lot of concern around the economy, around immigration. And then there are actual numbers behind this. The birth rates in the US are historically low. Birth rates in Europe and many other countries around the world are historically low and below what is called the replacement rate, which is the number of children each average woman needs to have

in order to preserve the population at current levels. So, you know, there is a demographic reality here that birth rates in many countries are low and so that is spurring certain types of people to say we need to have more kids. But again, it becomes tied in with these ideas about, oh, we need to have more kids to prevent the decline of Western civilization is a buzzword they often throw in there.

Yeah, and to me it feels very like we need to preserve the white race kind of coded because these are the same people that are also insisting that America cracks down on immigration, right? Yeah, exactly. So as I've kind of been alluding to, there are certain types of people who show more of an interest in this. In many cases, they are white people and they are white people who have expressed simultaneously kind of an interest in preserving the white race.

nationalist identity. I mean, isn't that just the great replacement theory kind of? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people who are into great replacement theory are 100% pronatalists. It's correlation maybe, but also often causation. Yeah, it's

I don't think inherently being a pronatalist makes you a white nationalist, but there's a lot of overlap. With the rise of pronatalism in Silicon Valley, has any of this led to any sort of more friendly parenting policies, more parental leave, any kind of push for tech companies to adopt measures, I guess, that would help their employees have more children? That is such a good question. And I think something that a lot of people are watching this current administration for to see if there will be any actual headings

helpful policy that comes out of this for would-be parents in the US. I mean, my husband and I happened to look at daycare prices the other day as we consider having kids and it's horrific. I mean, truly to the point where it can change your decision one way or another. Am I able to do this or not? So there's tons of parents or would-be parents who would love some relief. Typically that is not

part of the package for pronatalists. I've spoken to a lot of pronatalists who specifically point at Scandinavian countries, European countries that do have, you know, pro-social policies that are good for families, good for parents. And they say, well, that didn't help there, that didn't increase birth rates there, so that's not worth exploring. I think a lot of American parents or would-be parents would disagree that it is worth exploring if you really want people to have kids.

You got to help them out and make it possible. There was that tweet the other day, and I'm trying to remember who posted it, but you probably saw it was some Silicon Valley guy. It was like this idea that you can have kids, you can afford it. Your parents had it 10 times harder than you. Think of all the modern luxuries that we have in life and think of what people had in the 1800s. You too should have as many children today as your ancestors did in the 1800s. I think that's kind of crazy because also in the 1800s, kids died at a higher rate. And I don't think that the

material conditions of children were that great in the 1800s. So yeah, you want to get into vaccines and maybe we should start by keeping kids healthy and safe. Like what should we go back to child labor laws being what they were? Like there's a million things from the past that have changed and rightfully so. A lot of

people that have been espousing this pro-natalist ideology are also believers in effective altruism or long-termism. Can you explain what these things are and how do these ideologies overlap? Long-termism is fundamentally the idea that when we're considering morals and ethics as human beings, we need to consider many generations down the line. So, you know, we don't just

owe it to our neighbors to be good people, we owe it to the people of the year 3000 who are counting on us to be good people. One way this gets tied to pronatalism is this birth rate question, these demographic questions about could society collapse if we have fewer kids and then there's no young people to take care of old people and similar to the way a lot of people worry about climate change, some people worry that demographic collapse is going to

destroy the world. I don't think there's like a ton of evidence to support that theory, but that is definitely one thing. I think another way that this gets tied to effective altruism is people who have spent a lot of their careers working with AI.

have this fear that AI is going to become all powerful, kind of take over the world, surpass humans. So these people start getting really interested in something called transhumanism, which is the idea that we can start to biologically, genetically alter the human race

to kind of keep up with AI or be able to hold our own in a world dominated by AI. So you start getting into all sorts of crazy stuff about like the ways that we can alter the reproductive process to not only have more kids, but to have better kids, which is where we start verging into eugenics territory. Yeah, so much of I feel like this pronatalism movement is tied in with eugenics,

Can you talk about that? Eugenics is a funny word. I have spoken with people who are kind of in these movements, in this pronatalism world, who will argue eugenics is unfairly coded as a negative thing. Whereas eugenics, all it really means is improving the gene pool of a species.

And so they say, like, what's wrong with that? An example that they love to use is, do you believe that two siblings should be able to have children together? And most people would say no for a variety of reasons, including that those children will be genetically disadvantaged. So they say, okay, so you're eugenicist.

So that's the kind of like level of argument we're dealing with. But yeah, it's if you believe that eugenics fundamentally is just improving genetics of human beings, there are a variety of technologies currently coming to market beginning like the early stages of coming to market that are fundamentally doing eugenics.

These are products that are going to allow people to select among embryos to pick the one that they believe is genetically superior. But of course things like CRISPR, which is actual gene editing, are right around the corner. So to me what's really fascinating about this moment is we have this convergence of like political ideologies

with extreme new cutting edge technologies. So like, this is all happening so fast. And wacky ideas are for the first time in history, like coming at a time when they might actually be possible to achieve with the technologies that are

coming downstream. I think it's also interesting that most of Yolande's children have been had through IVF. And obviously, if you do IVF, you're not doing eugenics, right? For a lot of people, it's just how they're able to get pregnant. A lot of people also do the PGS testing, right, to make sure that your embryo is viable. It's not a far jump, as you said, to

see how a lot of these gene editing therapies or things could be implemented. To sort of play devil's advocate, why do you think the pro-natalist movement is dangerous? Like, isn't it great to encourage people to have more children and families in America? Yeah, I mean, listen, I try to keep a fairly open mind. Over the summer, I wrote a story about a company called ORCID that is doing this pre-implantation genetic testing.

And I spoke with parents who have something called the BRCA gene mutation, which will make their kids horrifically more likely to die of prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, breast cancer. I completely understand why a parent would look at their personal family history and say, "I would do everything I can to protect my child from this."

The trouble is with so many of these things is, you know, it's a slippery slope. So is picking one embryo over the other a problem when one of those is more likely to die of a really horrific disease?

Probably not. But what happens when you start picking the one with the preferable eye color? What happens when companies, which they have started doing, start promising to detect IQ in an embryo? Should you be able to pick for that? I think that the questions get progressively slipperier. And then certainly,

the direction things are going in our society. You know, I don't know if you've seen Gattaca, the film, but for anyone who hasn't seen it, the plot is basically, you know, a futuristic society in which everyone can do this kind of gene editing and make designer babies. And so, yeah,

There's this poor unlucky schmuck who gets born with a heart condition because his parents were too selfish to make sure that he was born completely healthy and perfect. And so he is ostracized from the society. Like, is that a society we want to live in where people are actually actively disenfranchised based on how they're born? Especially as we watch this moment unfold in American governance where like,

It seems that Elon and his Doge team are on a mission to turn everything into this like completely data-based stratified society where certain people are advantaged based on their data, et cetera. I think it's a really slippery slope.

Your data is like gold to hackers. They're selling your passwords, bank details, and private messages. McAfee helps stop them. SecureVPN keeps your online activity private. AI-powered text scam detector spots phishing attempts instantly. And with award-winning antivirus, you get top-tier hacker protection. Plus, you'll get up to $2 million in identity theft coverage, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com. Cancel any time. Terms apply.

Save on Cox Internet when you add Cox Mobile and get fiber-powered internet at home and unbeatable 5G reliability on the go. So whether you're playing a game at home or attending one live,

You can do more without spending more. Learn how to save at Cox.com slash internet. Cox internet is connected to the premises via coaxial cable. Cox mobile runs on the network with unbeatable 5g reliability as measured by UCLA LLC in the U S two H 2023 results may vary, not endorsement of the restrictions apply. Yeah. Especially with the rise of like for-profit insurance and the way that our insurance industry currently works and evaluates risk. And, um, I mean already the amount of data that they have on us is terrifying and, um,

I was thinking of RFK's confirmation hearing just recently when Bernie Sanders asks RFK Jr. if he thinks healthcare is a human right. He doesn't. Surprise, surprise. The Make America Healthy Again movement does not believe in universal healthcare. And he gave the reason of like, well, what if somebody smoked for 30 years? Basically, they don't deserve healthcare.

And I thought that was wild. It's this implication that like you are to blame for your own health problems. And look, of course, like, okay, maybe smoking is more of a choice, but certain other people are exposed to environmental toxins or they have a job where they're exposed to COVID 9 million times because they're not allowed to wear PPE or any other number of things. You're born, like you said, with a heart condition. It's so easy to see how people are already comfortable even today weeding out it.

undesirables, right? Like just even since the beginning of COVID, like it went from like this 2020 idea of like perfect the vulnerable, like make sure everyone is healthy to now like people like, well, just let the people that are sick die already. Why can't they die quicker? Totally.

which is the other side of eugenics, you know, like there's, I'm trying to remember how they put it, but it's basically like positive eugenics, I think, where you're selecting for the best of the best, but then there's negative eugenics, which is what the Nazis did, where you're trying to eliminate certain parts of the gene pool that you have deemed the worst. So yeah, I think the risks inherent in all of this are pretty obvious and terrifying. Are any of these Silicon Valley executives investing in things

things like artificial wombs or other sort of reproductive technologies that could free women. I feel like when they talk about pushing pronatalism, whatever,

So much of it is also about the subjugation of women and the sort of relegating women to their role as mothers, keeping them at home with all of their babies. But is there any chance that they could be developing technologies that would actually make things more equal? There's a number of technologies currently under development. Artificial wombs is one of those. It's still one of the more far out, unrealistic ones presently, but there are companies working on it and there are

investors whose names we would all recognize. And certainly some of these, I think you could make the argument could be good for women.

There's one company I actually am really interested in called Gamito that is developing solutions to make IVF a more painless process. It's basically shortening that time. If you're freezing eggs or doing IVF, you need to shoot yourself up with hormones and it's a pretty uncomfortable process. And so they've developed technology to develop those ovarian cells outside of that process so that women don't have to shoot themselves up with these drugs

for quite as many days. I think it's down from like seven to ten days down to like three or something. There's a lot of these technologies that I think a lot of women would love to see. Again, unfortunately, I think what we're seeing is this convergence of the technologies coming from one side and the political ideologies coming from another side and they're going to hit at the exact same time. And so

you know, does JD Vance care much about making women's lives more productive or comfortable? I'm not convinced. Well, yeah. Talk more about that because why is the pro-natalist movement so tied in with the far right? Yeah, I think it goes back to what we were talking about before. There's a lot of reasons for why

white Christian nationalists to feel particularly persecuted in this moment and to see this as their chance to fight back by having more kids, by becoming a more, once again, even more dominant in our culture. One of my biggest worries is that in a few years, women are going to see our status in society backslide quite a bit. I think it's inevitable that some of this language that we're now seeing

From the campaign trail to now inside the White House. You see it on Elon Musk's Twitter. He's for years now actually tweeted stuff like a woman's most important job is as a mother. I do think it's a matter of time before that trickles down into our reality. I think it's a matter of time before women in the workplace start to feel those pressures. So yes, I know that this is going back. You said like, oh, to be a devil's advocate, couldn't this be good for women? I doubt it. Exactly. Exactly.

I want to talk about one sort of famous pro-natalist family. I feel like they're the main ones that get profiled all the time. And I think you've profiled them, which is the Collins family. This is a couple who I think they live in Pennsylvania. They have a bunch of kids. They've sort of become the face of the pro-natalist movement. Why do you think there's such a fascination with this one family in particular? That's a great question that I keep asking every time another publication releases their profile. I did it first.

This was years ago. It seems like the same story comes out every six months or so. To any journalists watching this, we're done. They've said their piece. I don't think we need to hear from them again. So I think the lead to my story was...

Malcolm surrounded by his kids who are screaming and fighting each other and shouting at me almost like foaming at the mouth talking to me about how his if his kids he wants to have at least eight kids and if they have at least eight kids and if they have at least eight kids they have at least eight kids within X number of generations his bloodline will rule the universe like this is really like straight out of sci-fi stuff

So, you know, I think with any of these ideas, you want to find a face for them. And they are...

very readable. Their story is very enticing. They are larger-than-life characters. They have everything planned out down to their outfits. They did a total makeover of the two of them a number of years ago where they decided which glasses they were gonna each wear and, you know, to be the most media friendly and most eye-catching. So they know exactly what they're doing and to a certain extent the media has walked into this trap over and over.

Like I said, I think it was worth doing once. I don't think that we need the same story every six months. I feel like it's interesting because they've just become kind of like the unofficial spokespeople of this movement. And they're quite unsettling, like you said. It's a weird, like if I was to choose the spokespeople for this movement, I guess I would choose someone like a little bit more trad and less like,

Reddit seeming? Like they have like Reddit forum energy. I don't know how to describe it. Yeah, well, it depends who's choosing the spokesperson. And in this case, I guess it's the media. And so, you know, it wasn't on my agenda to set out and find the best representatives to profile. I was I picked the most extreme. So they are the most extreme.

Yeah, I think while the Collinses have been sort of attracting tons of media attention, we've also seen the rise of things like the Tradwife movement and these other massive influencers that espouse a lot of sort of similar pro-natalist ideas, but without specifically, I guess, mentioning the ideology or talking about it. How tied in are people like that with this broader movement, or is that sort of an adjacent similar movement?

It's adjacent and similar. It's kind of like I was talking about the convergence of the technology with this political moment, with this economic moment. The world is so crazy right now. So many different factors are moving at once, but they all seem to be moving in a particular direction. And that is...

towards what kind of boils down to a return to an old America for better or for much, much worse. Okay, so all these Silicon Valley billionaires want to have lots of babies. They're encouraging people to have lots of babies. You know, they're fathering tons of kids through IVF with God knows how many women. Why should people pay attention to this? Why does this even matter? For the same reason that we should care, frankly, about anything Elon Musk does at this point, because he's currently the most powerful person in the world. He is currently...

not only playing the massive role in our economy and our technological development that he has for years, but he is calling the shots for our government. This is where I talk to my friends and

they kind of raise their eyebrows at me and say really is that going to happen but um yeah i really do think that we're going to start to see the trickle-down effects of this kind of stuff that's happening amongst the silicon valley elite to women in the united states and possibly around the world but i really do have a concern that

women's place in society is going to change in the next few years. How do you see those trickle-down effects manifesting? I think a lot of it will be sort of subtle cultural changes. He has already transformed the conversation by buying Twitter. A lot of people rolled their eyes at that when it first happened and said, like, why would he possibly want to own this company? And to me, it was fairly obvious that he wanted to change the conversation, and he's done that.

There have been talks about him possibly buying TikTok lately. It doesn't look like it's going to happen, but why would he be interested in that? Because he can change the conversation. Well, he's controlling the information environment, right? Exactly. Exactly. So in very powerful ways, he is reshaping American culture as we speak. And again, now he's turned his sights to government.

There have been early hints of policy changes that might come down the line, certain benefits that might be extended to families who have more kids. I think that protections for women in the workplace are going to be reduced. I mean, the attacks on DEI, those are going to hurt women. I wrote a story in the fall for the information about...

women in tech who are sounding the alarm about their place in the tech workplace. They are already, even before the presidential election, even before Elon Musk

Rose to so much power. I think a lot of women in tech were already feeling the downstream effects of this. I remember speaking with women years ago when I first reported the story of Siobhan Zillis having Elon's twin secretly. I spoke with a lot of women who knew her in the past in the tech industry and who felt just devastated by this news, who felt

Like, what does this say about us? What does this tell you about how men in our workplaces perceive us? That we're just, you know, vessels for their children. We're not their colleagues. We're not their respected staff. So yeah, I think it's going to be like a thousand cuts for women

in our economy, in our society. I think for young women, they're really feeling it. I know, Taylor, you've reported on this a lot on the rise of the bro podcaster, on the rise of misogyny in college environments, on the way that men feel comfortable speaking to women in a way that they didn't for years there and will feel comfortable pressuring women into marriages that they don't want to be in, having kids that they didn't plan to have. There's going to be an attack on reproductive rights.

So it's really a huge question. How is this actually going to trickle down to women in a million ways? We're already seeing. Yeah, I mean, so much of it, I think it's just tied to the restriction of reproductive rights, right? If your goal is and you believe sort of the most important thing is for women to have as many children as possible, you're going to make it harder for them to have birth control, for them to have planned pregnancies, right? Like you're going to make it

harder for them. And it's such a weird thing because I think at the same time that all of this is happening, there's so many women. I mean, I feel like you and I probably know a lot of women around the same age where it's like they actually desperately want to have kids, but they can't afford it. It's so hard. The economy is already sort of stacked against them. And

We know that if a woman has a kid and she's already in a precarious financial situation, she's going to be even more reliant usually on the man or the father of the child. And that gives her even less autonomy over her own life and career and et cetera. Absolutely. It's the one place that I actually do see a lot of bipartisan support. I guess I've been spending a lot of time with like,

right-of-center think tanks recently who are very pronatalist and this for them is one issue where they often find common ground with more left-wing thinkers. Basically there's this whole thing called like the abundance agenda which is trying to tie kind of right-side ideologies about promoting economic dynamism with more left-wing stuff about providing

just more resources for individuals in the U.S. So that might be a stretch. But yeah, I feel like it's a stretch because I will say one of the things that both parties seem aligned on is cutting our social safety net, right? We saw record cuts to the social safety net under Biden. Trump has rolled it back even further. It seems like neither political party wants to give people any sort of

widespread support. It's also interesting though, I mean, I interviewed Candace Owens recently about her, the launch of her women's media company. This is a woman who sat on the phone for 20 minutes saying that she didn't believe in paid maternity leave and yet is

Hugely, I would say pronatalist in the sense that she believes women's greatest achievement in life is having kids. Women need to have as many kids as possible. It's the only thing that she believes truly fulfills a woman, etc, etc. So I just, I don't know. It's interesting how so many of these sort of reactionaries, it seems like they want to trap women in this position and women are increasingly not given the choice.

you know, as to whether or not they want to stay home with the children or are forced to. I have fun making predictions about what will happen in tech, what will happen in this country in politics. And unfortunately, my current prediction is let's check back in three years and see how many women are in the workforce compared to today. I think that number will go down. When people talk about settling down, having as many kids as possible, too, I feel like there's a bunch of right-wingers

and tech people that are also very focused on dating apps and optimizing matchmaking and dating. There was that super right-wing guy, Justin something or other, right-wing influencer who I think got fired from his teaching job actually for saying super bigoted stuff. But he believed in sort of matching people based on their genetic profile or certain traits.

Is anyone in Silicon Valley focused on the dating question and sort of helping people partner up so that they can have all of these children? Absolutely. As you said, this has been kind of in the water for a while. I've seen hints of this where people post on X about dating. And even when I first met Simone and Malcolm Collins, they sent me a dating matchmaking form because they identified me as an eligible bachelorette who might be able to reproduce with

a compatible partner and have 13 children. I did not fill it out in the end. There is actually someone who has gone so far as to implement this in his company. You will be shocked to learn he is a Thiel Fellow, meaning funded by Peter Thiel originally. And he has a company called Nucleus Genomics, which recently introduced a dating service called Nucleus Dating, I believe. I think it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also fully exists.

And this is basically a straight out of Gattaca dating matchmaking service that compares your genetic compatibility with a partner so that you don't have to get so far down the line and then realize right before you have kids, right before you're supposed to start IVF, which of course everyone in Silicon Valley now does for these reasons. And you don't have to get that far without realizing that, oh no, you both have a certain genetic mutation that runs in your family or something.

you know, your kid won't be as tall as you want or have as high an IQ as you want. So we are quite literally entering sci-fi territory faster than I ever predicted we would. Well, Julia, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much. This was fun. That's all for this week's episode. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. In the meantime, don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, Usermag. That's usermag.co, usermag.co.

If you like this podcast, please give us a rating and review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Every single review counts. Thanks. And we'll see you next week.