Elon Musk is offering up his sperm to future Mars colonists, an overture that nobody seemed to ask for from the world’s most prominent natalist.
According to the New York Times, the billionaire made the offer to “seed a colony” as part of a SpaceX effort to design a Martian colony from scratch.
“There’s high urgency to making life multi-planetary,” he said, per the Times. “We’ve got to do it while civilization is so strong.”
Though Musk’s plans to launch a manned mission to the red planet by this year were dashed, he now expects to settle a million colonists in the next 20 years, including numerous of his own offspring.
Musk is already a father to at least 12, including three children he shares with NeuraLink executive Shivon Zilis and another three with musician Grimes.
The Tesla CEO, a proud “pro-natalist,” has previously warned of decreasing birth rates.
“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk proclaimed in a 2022 post on Twitter.
The natalism movement, which has become closely entangled with other far-right, often conspiracy-driven or race-science-connected, ideologies,
Other prominent pro-natalists, including Simone and Malcolm Collins, have warned that falling birth rates in Western Europe and North America pose a specific threat to the cultures of those countries, a sentiment shared by New Zealand’s 2019 Christchurch shooter in his manifesto, who wrote that it was about the “birthrates.”
Musk, whose family built their wealth in Apartheid South Africa, previously claimed that “civilization is going to crumble” in a speech encouraging Tesla employees to have more children.