Topline
The world’s wealthiest man Elon Musk apparently confirmed a report from Insider that he had twins with an executive at his company Neuralink last year in a characteristically cheeky tweet Thursday.
Elon Musk speaks at SpaceX’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica Village, Texas on February 10, 2022.
Key Facts
Musk tweeted he’s “doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” explaining that “a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
The tweet comes a day after Insider reported on court records about Musk and Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis filing for the twins to have Musk’s last name and Zilis’ last name as part of their middle name.
Musk has previously expressed concern about the U.S.’ declining birth rate, and a graphic of the U.S. total fertility rate he tweeted May 24 is his pinned tweet.
After one of Musk’s children died in 2002, the twins mark his eighth and ninth known living children of Musk, who didn’t respond to Forbes’ request for comment on the Insider report Wednesday.
Zilis has worked as Neuralink’s director of operations and special projects since 2017, helping oversee the company’s development of brain-machine interfaces.
Crucial Quote
“Population of Mars is still zero people!,” Musk said in a follow-up tweet referring to his hopes to colonize the planet.
Key Background
Musk’s $230.8 billion fortune is by far the largest in the world, according to Forbes’ calculations. Musk had six children with his first wife Justine Wilson, though one of his children died in 2002. He fathered two children with his former partner, the singer Grimes, in 2020 and 2021. The couple famously named their son “X Æ A-12” in May 2020 (Grimes says the name is pronounced “X A.I. Archangel”).
Tangent
Critics of the population collapse theory touted by Musk cast the idea as racist and anti-immigrant. Though Musk is right that the fertility rate declined in the U.S. from 3.67 total births per woman to 1.6 births per woman from 1960 to 2020, the U.S. population nearly doubled from 179 million to 331 million over the same time period. Recent population growth has largely been driven by immigrants. Obsession over birth rates is common among supporters of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that white people are being replaced in America by people of color. Musk didn’t comment on recent pushback about the often problematic links to birth rate concerns, but said in 2019 his worries about potential population decline aren’t anti-immigrant, explaining, “The common rebuttal is like, ‘Well what about immigration?’ I’m like, ‘From where?’”
Further Reading
Elon Musk Secretly Fathered Twins With Neuralink Executive, Report Says (Forbes)
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/07/07/musk-comments-on-having-twins-with-top-employee-doing-my-best-to-help-the-underpopulation-crisis/