Elon Musk’s Feud With Grimes Is a Warning

Elon Musk is the father of at least 10 children. He has five with his ex Justine Musk, who has written that she felt like an employee in their marriage, rather than a partner. He secretly had twins in 2021 with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his company Neuralink; the rumor among their colleagues, Reuters reported, was that there was no romance, just IVF. Musk confirmed last month that he and Grimes, his more recent ex, are the parents of three kids, two of whom were born via surrogacy. Grimes is now suing Musk for parental rights, having asked, Vulture reported, in a now-deleted X post: “tell Elon to let me see my son.”

Musk’s many, many kids and his pattern toward the women he has them with aren’t just fodder for gossip. They’re connected to Musk’s larger worldview—one that the billionaire owner of an increasingly chaotic social media platform is now working to spread far beyond his own family.

Musk has been called “the tech world’s highest-profile pronatalist, albeit unofficially” by Insider, and it’s clear that at least some of his views line up with the movement’s. The pronatalists, or natalists, as some call themselves, believe that low birth rates—especially low birth rates among the “high-achieving” and “really smart”—is the No. 1 danger plaguing the nation, and the world writ large. This ranks the number of babies women are having as more important than income inequality, gun violence, or even the continued risk of climate disaster. Really: Elon Musk has called low birth rates “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” They also believe that the biological effects of hormonal birth control and abortion—which Musk has linked to the “crumble” of civilization—coupled with a lack of support for parents and families are driving these decreasing birth rates.

Some of these concerns do make sense: Certainly, there should be much more support for parents, especially mothers, in the United States. Subsidized child care and a health care system where childbirth doesn’t cost parents $10,000 on average would be a good place to start, in my opinion as a medical sociologist with training in reproductive health and demography. Easing financial barriers to parenthood, like housing prices and the student loan crisis, would help, too.

Some of the concerns of pronatalists, though, are downright disturbing, as well as misplaced: There is no evidence that women’s ability to control their fertility—a practice that has always existed, if via other means—is the main driver of low birth rates. Nor should women be responsible for fixing demographic trends with their bodies. While some pronatalists proclaim they are pro-choice, some hint at the ills of abortion or are explicitly against it. Forced births are not a viable solution to a dip in birth rates. Further, pronatalism is at least sometimes tied to racism and the “great replacement theory,” a belief that nonwhites and immigrants will soon outnumber white voters in Western nations.

Globally, birth rates are declining, but the reality of this is more nuanced than pronatalists often paint it as being. Demographers agree that a fertility decline does not indicate the “end of babies,” but rather that many women are now delaying when they have children until they feel ready. Declining birth rates are also not a worrying long-term trend: Most of us were taught at one point that resources will soon be depleted due to too much population growth. An ebb can be viewed as good news.

Instead of working to make parenthood easier for anyone who does want kids, some of the loudest proponents, namely the Silicon Valley megawealthy, have committed themselves to solving this alleged societal ailment with blunt force: by reproducing as much as possible among themselves. You might remember the bespectacled Malcolm and Simone Collins, who penned an opinion piece in the New York Post in January titled “Why the World Needs More Big Families Like Ours Amid the Population Crisis” (a side benefit: “growing our family has made us more efficient as CEOs,” they wrote). In their own reproductive journey, they are having their embryos genetically tested for “mental-performance-adjacent traits,” according to reporting by Insider.

Their pronatalism extends far beyond their bedrooms. The Collinses, who run a pronatalist website, are now part of a lineup for the “Natalist Conference” taking place in Austin, Texas, this December, which will spread the seeds of their ideology. Among the 14 other speakers is “The Raw Egg Nationalist,” whom some will know as the author of the book about eating raw eggs to fight “globalism” in the food chain, or as a star in Tucker Carlon’s documentary The End of Men. Another speaker is Charles Haywood, who runs The Worthy House, a Substack focused on a “post-liberal future” and whose Twitter bio warns that that Moloch (a mythical god of child sacrifice) “is within the gates.” The Natalist Conference landing page warns: “By the end of the century, nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse. Thousands of unique cultures and populations will be snuffed out.”

For his part, Musk has donated $10 million to the University of Texas in Austin, Bloomberg reported in August, to create the Population Wellbeing Initiative (PWI), a research program tasked with generating research on his concerns about there being too few babies. The director, Dean Spears, an economist who received the grant from Musk, has written about dwindling fertility rates possibly leading humanity to “end with a whimper” and penned an opinion piece in the New York Times last month about the global population peaking in our lifetimes. Though not all of the PWI’s research directly speaks to Musk’s concerns, their research program overall can be used by pronatalists to promote their beliefs. If the birth rate is really such a dire issue for humanity, it’s not as big a leap to think that the uptake of birth control and general autonomy for women has gone too far. (That $10 million is also the kind of funding that, say, abortion research, which has long relied on private donors, could really, really use.)

Musk doesn’t just want a big family for himself, and he isn’t just being a jerk to his exes. He’s hoping that everyone—well, maybe just people who are like him—will have more babies.
He’s using his influence and superlative wealth to support a movement that isn’t good for women. And against the backdrop of the end of Roe v. Wade, we can’t afford to look away.