Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, said people should have more kids without stressing too much over the costs associated with rearing children.
When asked for his advice on younger people looking to start a family, the Tesla CEO, who is currently worth an estimated $241 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, said to “start immediately.”
“I think people worry too much about having kids, and it’s sometimes difficult to make ends meet and whatnot,” said Musk during a pro-Trump rally in Harrisburg, Pa., on Saturday. “But honestly, there’s really no time like the present. Just have kids. You won’t be sorry. It’ll work out.”
In 2015, the USDA estimated that raising a child in the U.S. through the age of 17 would cost a family about $233,610. What’s more, skyrocketing inflation during the past few years has especially weighed on parents, and three out of four parents say raising a child is “far more expensive than expected,” according to a LendingTree study from April.
The share of parents who said they are doing well financially also dropped to 73% in 2023 from 75% in 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Musk, who confirmed the birth of his 12th child in June, has for years been obsessed with the threat of population decline. In a February post on X, he encouraged people to have three or more kids to “help humanity grow,” and for years has touted the theories of “pronatalists” that in some cases link lower birth rates to the ultimate collapse of Western civilization.
“A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” he tweeted in 2022.
Yet experts have pushed back on claims by Musk and other Silicon Valley pronatalists like investor Marc Andreessen that having more kids will help solve humanity’s problems. In August, two such experts, Emily Klancher Merchant, an assistant professor of science and technology studies at UC Davis, and Win Brown, a research affiliate at the University of Washington’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, compared the pronatalist push to have more kids to a “Ponzi scheme” in which new generations carry the weight of the older generations. They also said regulation and redistribution would be a better way of solving social and economic problems.
Musk, despite his insistence on people having more kids, has thrown his support behind former President Donald Trump, even though access to IVF has been threatened or paused in some states after three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. Since the Supreme Court overturned a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, hundreds more babies have died than expected in the U.S., CNN reported. Trump said earlier this month that he and the Republican Party are in favor of IVF, the fertilization method used by women who may otherwise be unable to conceive a child.
