https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-new-fertility-inequality/July 25, 2024
Last month, Bloomberg reported that Elon Musk had become a father for the 12th time. The world’s richest man has been sounding the alarm on global fertility decline for years, long before public opinion had accepted and internalized the new facts about crashing birth rates. Claiming that civilization itself is threatened by potential population collapse, Musk is practicing what he preaches.
Rather than being part of the solution, however, Musk is in reality part of the problem. While marriage is the world’s most potent fertility strategy, only half of Musk’s children have been born inside marriage, and none of those in nearly 20 years. While assisted reproductive technologies, or ART, account for only 2 percent of US births, all of Musk’s 11 surviving children have been conceived through it. While Musk’s extreme wealth supports his very high fertility, it also contributes to wealth inequality and poverty that is itself a driver of societal-level fertility decline and fertility inequality, particularly among men. Sharing children with (at least) three different women, Musk isn’t boosting birth rates, but instead practicing a high-tech form of polygyny. He is an avatar of fertility inequality for an infertile age.
