The Radical Deficiency of Elon Musk’s Pronatalism 

Elon Musk’s family life and views on procreation are making the news, including in a recent exposé in the Wall Street Journal interviewing several women who have borne his children. The picture that has emerged is ugly, messy, and weird. This is not just a story about a talented but morally flawed Silicon Valley visionary. Musk’s is an attitude of detached posthuman nihilism that enables him to evade the norms of familial relationships in the pursuit of creating more and better babies. This vision strips procreation and family of their intrinsic meaning and goodness and ignores the earnestness and intimacy of family life that are hallmarks of authentic natalism.   

Musk’s Family Life 

Elon Musk is the CEO of three massive companies, owns several others, and has been a right–hand man to President Trump for the first months of his presidency as de facto head of the (nongovernmental) Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk also has a large family and is an outspoken proponent of having more children to reverse the fertility crisis. He has become something of a standard-bearer for this cause. The trouble is that his own family life and natalist philosophy reflect a distorted understanding of children, the family, the human person, and the common good.  

We do not know exactly how many children Elon Musk has fathered, but there are at least fourteen. Those close to Musk say the number is much higher than what is publicly known. Musk has been seen at several public events recently with his four-year-old son “X,” including an extended news conference in the Oval Office with President Trump and a political rally for the president.  

According to a Wall Street Journal exposé, however, Musk has an appointed consigliere who manages his family affairs. He deals with the various mothers of his children (there are at least four such women) often through this intermediary. Ashley St. Clair, one of Musk’s partners, has alleged that he uses nondisclosure agreements and financial incentives to discourage the mothers of his children from talking about him or criticizing him publicly. He is also alleged to have approached women on his social media platform, X, and asked them via direct message whether they would be willing to bear his children.  

Musk, in short, projects an image of fatherhood in which children are an accessory to a desired lifestyle and an ancillary feature or secondary concern to his professional and political pursuits. This is more than a moral blind spot. In one sense Musk is very serious about having kids, but he also has a very distorted view of conventional ways of conceiving and raising them.  

Musk’s Anti-human Pronatalism 

Musk has stated that he sees fertility decline as a grave existential risk to humanity. In 2023, he tweeted that “[p]opulation collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” At a conference in Saudi Arabia last year, he said that “[i]f you don’t make new humans, there’s no humanity, and all the policies in the world don’t matter.” This may sound like a message society needs to hear: some commentators have a single-minded focus on impeding climate catastrophe to the extent that they come to see having kids as an evil because of their impact on the environment, and Musk balks at this view. Indeed, concerns about declining fertility are real and, to his credit, Musk has been bold in calling this out when many others are in denial or not brave enough to speak out on this matter. Nonetheless, Musk’s approach is unconventional at best and damaging at worst, ultimately viewing children as a product rather than a gift to be received. 

The technocratic means that Musk and his Silicon Valley confreres propose for addressing fertility decline reflect a distorted and utilitarian view of human natality. Silicon Valley is home to extensive research into “ectogenesis,” the conception and gestation of babies in petri dishes and artificial wombs, as well as polygenic screening of IVF embryos to create children with desirable traits. Musk himself has had several of his own children via IVF and surrogacy and has said, in texts seen by the WSJ, that he may need to use more surrogates to achieve his procreative goals. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse . . . we will need to use surrogates,” one text read. 

Musk also appears to be focused on producing intelligent kids. He encouraged Shivon Zilis, a top official at Neuralink, to have children because she is “smart,” Zilis recounts in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk. Musk has had four children with her. Musk straddles the line between father and mere sperm donor, emotionally bonding with the children at times but also being largely absent day to day, according to the biography. Rather than being a romantic relationship, his relationship with Zilis sounds more like a friendship of utility for the purpose of procreation. 

One could be forgiven for thinking that there is some sort of grand vision behind Musk’s rhetoric and procreative largesse. Many tech gurus in Silicon Valley are obsessed with immortality and life extension, a preoccupation that appears to have its genesis in a transhumanist philosophy similar to that championed by philosophers like Ray Kurtzweil and Nick Bostrom. The difference with Musk, we might say, is that, instead of trying to extend his own life, he wants to live forever through his progeny, and having as many as possible seems like the best way to ensure this. He would appear to see himself as a founding figure in an imperial dynasty. He named one of his children “Romulus,” a reference to the legendary founder of the ancient city of Rome. He has described his children as “legion,” a reference to the imperial units that would facilitate the expansion of the Roman empire. Musk also reportedly offered his own sperm to colonize Mars, a lifelong goal of his and an apparent motivation for many of his business ventures.  

But it is perhaps more accurate to say that based on his decisions and the limited statements he’s made regarding his family, Musk is a kind of post-human nihilist indulging in a grand act of techno-fantasy with his own family. That is to say, Musk fundamentally doubts the value and wisdom of the sorts of norms that typically govern how human beings form caring and nurturing families, such as stable spousal love, or the norm of procreating through sex, or even just giving a conventional name to one’s child (Musk named one of his children “X Æ A-12″). Instead, he has used assisted reproduction and loose relationships with his female partners to personally help secure humanity’s future.  

Philosophical Problems with Musk’s Pronatalism 

Musk’s techno-utilitarian approach to natality runs afoul of a fundamental tenet of an authentic natalism, namely, a firm commitment to the intrinsic value of all human beings, and especially of children. Children are not objects to be produced like electric vehicles that will address climate change or spaceships that will allow us to fly to Mars. Natality is good not just because it positively contributes to the future of humanity or because it has an economic benefit. Rather, children are human beings with intrinsic value, a value that transcends their significance in our own personal story and life plans.  

Much of the anti-natalist literature is driven by concerns about the pain that children bring into the world or economic and environmental costs of having children. One recent article in a prestigious bioethics journal went as far as identifying normative and pragmatic reasons for labelling pregnancy as a “disease.” But children are more than a source of pleasure and pain. Neither are they units for decline or growth of capital or causes of environmental degradation. They are the bearers of the same transcendent value that all human beings have and are worthy recipients of our unconditional love.  

Musk’s approach to childbearing and parenting in different ways commodifies children, and one might go as far as to say that it is an outgrowth of the “culture of death” that John Paul II warned of in Evangelium Vitae. John Paul wrote that the “various techniques of artificial reproduction, which would seem to be at the service of life and which are frequently used with this intention, actually open the door to new threats against life.” Human life, then, is cheapened when children are instrumentalized to achieve personal or policy goals, even if they’re morally good (or neutral). 

The value one places on children and family is reflected in how we choose to conceive. Creating children through IVF and surrogacy, or through relationships initiated by online connections and then formalized by legal contracts, instrumentalizes women and children and will only reinforce the negative attitudes that members of the public have toward the idea of bringing new life into the world. What we need are positive stories that witness to the value of having a family rather than stories about people who have been hurt and burned in family life. Or, more to the point, we don’t want to deny that family life has challenges, but we want to give witness to the idea that you can make things work if you have the right view of your kids and the unsurpassable importance of family. Fundamentally, children are a gift to receive, not a part of a life plan, not a scheme to perpetuate our “good genes,” not a lifestyle choice, and certainly not something we can manipulate to fit our own selfish ends. 

To be clear, Musk is discrediting natalism as such. He is currently one of the most prominent standard-bearers for the idea that people should have more children, and he is doing, quite frankly, a terrible job of promoting the cause. Natalism in its various forms is being written off as a right-wing, even nationalistic concern. But there is nothing inherently political about the idea that forming families is vital to a flourishing society.  

The family as an institution has its own inner logic, wisdom, and social purpose. The families in which we grow up, after all, help us to appreciate each other as we are and to have the hopeful confidence to take the risk of starting a family ourselves. Saint Pope John Paul II made this point in Centesimus Annus:  

The first and fundamental structure for “human ecology” is the family, in which man receives his first formative ideas about truth and goodness, and learns what it means to love and to be loved, and thus what it actually means to be a person.  

The family helps us to appreciate the value that human beings have as givers and receivers of love. Pope John Paul II goes on to warn of the risk that people may instead see themselves and their lives in terms of “a series of sensations to be experienced rather than as a work to be accomplished.” This disordered self-understanding diminishes people’s freedom, renders them incapable of sustaining stable relationships, and leads them to think of children as “things” to be acquired rather than creatures with dignity and value.  

Committing to conventional family life and creating a nurturing environment for one’s children, then, is a meaningful and worthwhile endeavor that can give life purpose, even if it also entails difficulties, risks, and disruptions to other life plans. This is not a message that comes through in Musk’s life and philosophy, but it is eloquently captured in recent literature on the value of having kids, two notable examples of which are Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s What Are Children For: On Ambivalence and Choice, and Catherine Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defining the Birth Dearth. These authors, from different sides of the political spectrum, converge on the view that having children can indeed be a meaningful, life-affirming, and even liberating act, and that our society’s great sickness is that we have become paralyzed by choice or rigid life plans to the extent of indefinitely delaying family formation.   

The Existential Value of the Family 

At some point we have to be honest about what makes life truly good. Landing on Mars may be an incredible feat, but it is only love and the pursuit of meaningful communion with others that makes such an endeavor worthwhile in the first place. The intimacy of familial love, in particular, is one of the greatest gifts and imbues life with meaning. Recapturing a sense of earnestness about family life is especially important to the pronatalist cause: it’s not just having children that matters. Raising them, nurturing them, and forming them to be whole, flourishing persons is a legacy worth pursuing.  

Image by JD Lasica and licensed via Wikimedia Commons.