What The Hell America!

Elon Musk told a conference in Saudi Arabia last year that his listeners “should view the birthrate as the single biggest problem [we] need to solve. If you don’t make new humans, there’s no humanity, and all the policies in the world don’t matter.” In this way, he spotlighted his commitment to the pronatalist cause—the idea that society must do more to prevent population decline due to falling fertility rates. He also underlined his personal commitment to the cause: “I mean, you know, you’ve got to walk the talk. So, I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids.”

Indeed. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Musk has had at least 14 children with four women—both the old-fashioned way and via IVF—and possibly many more. Musk’s brand of high-tech polygamy has its fans. After hearing about Musk’s child with Ashley St. Clair, the Republican former Representative Matt Gaetz posted on X: “This child has incredible genetics. Much love to this wonderful family.”

Elizabeth Bruenig: The harem of Elon Musk

Musk’s approach to family formation represents a brave new world where polygamy and technology have united to create families far out of historic demographic norms. Because Elon is an outspoken pronatalist, and because reproductive technology keeps advancing, his family has taken on a larger-than-life status. The future of family life, and even civilization itself, could hinge on this approach becoming more common—or so the rhetoric seems to suggest. The right-wing commentator Richard Hanania has celebrated Musk as “the one billionaire acting in accordance with evolutionary ­theory.”

At a time when birth rates are declining across the world, techno-polygamy might sound like a good model for those who can afford it. But research on family structure has found that wealth and good genes aren’t everything. When children grow up in a single-parent home, they are more likely to undershoot their potential, even if Mom and Dad are both very rich. It might seem that children of the world’s richest man will do just fine, but no matter how much money you pour into raising your kids, no matter how many tutors you hire or compounds you build, evidence suggests children are more likely to struggle if one of their parents is absent than if their family is intact.

Demographers and sociologists have known this for a long time. Among the top 30 percent of families by income, children who grow up with two parents in the home are 15 percentage points more likely to complete college than those from non-intact households, according to data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Stable families also tend to produce richer kids. Among children who grew up in families in the top 10 percent by income when they were young, those raised in a stable home environment ended up more than 10 percentage points higher in adult-income rank than their socioeconomic peers without stable homes.

The Musk children will probably never have to worry about money. But the apparent discord among Musk, the mothers of his children, and the children themselves is a familiar part of life for children from non-intact families. In looking at the National Survey of Children’s Health for 2021–23, our colleagues at the Institute for Family Studies found that rich kids from non-intact families did markedly worse emotionally and socially than their peers from intact families. Even after controlling for factors such as race and parental education, rich kids from non-intact families were 58 percent more likely to be diagnosed as depressed, 67 percent more likely to have their parents contacted by schools for behavioral or learning problems, and 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety, compared with rich children from intact families.

Marc Novicoff: The loneliness of the conservative pronatalist

The increasing popularity of surrogacy and IVF is facilitating conditions that we know are undesirable for children and for society at large. Musk reportedly has 12 children conceived by IVF, of which nine were born male and three female. Statistically, that ratio is highly unlikely without genetic selection for males. In the U.S. as a whole, looking at all IVF births from 2016 to 2023, there were 104 boys for every 100 girls; even for births where parents specifically screened embryos for sex, the ratio was just 164 to 100. If the Musk family’s ratio were scaled up, there would have been 300 boys born for every 100 girls.

Sex selection on this scale would mean a demographic bust, because of the huge number of males produced. Too many excess males is a problem because males cannot reproduce on their own, thus limiting population growth, and because an excess of males tends to generate social conflict.

Among all IVF births, roughly 80 percent of babies were singletons, while about 20 percent were twins or multiples. Among the known Musk IVF children, fewer than 50 percent are singletons. These ratios likely happen through a choice to maximize offspring—even though multiple births are much more risky for the mother, which is why IVF clinics now discourage intentionally trying for them.

Family scholars have long known that children whose fathers have children with many partners have worse outcomes because of more fractious family relationships and lower-quality relationships with their fathers, as a result of divided paternal time and attention. Conflicts among wives also cause significant problems for children. These family dynamics are consistent with the Musk family drama covered in the media—just in the past year, for instance, two of his children’s mothers, Grimes and Ashley St. Clair, have engaged in legal and online battles with Musk.

The final irony is that Musk’s clan averages between 1.4 and 2.3 children born per woman, depending on whether Musk employed repeat surrogates or different ones every time. That is similar to or perhaps even lower than the U.S. average completed fertility rate for comparable women of 2.2.

All of this suggests that techno-polygamy is a dead end for family life. Even pronatalists like us do not want more births regardless of the dangers to the lives of mothers, the basic well-being of children, or the integrity of the family. The ultimate privilege for any child, even the richest, is a stable, loving family headed by their own two married parents.