Elon Musk is offering his sperm to future colonists on Mars, a proposal that no one seemed to have asked for from the world’s foremost natalist.
According to the New York Times, the billionaire made the offer to establish a colony as part of a SpaceX project to design a colony on Mars from scratch.
“There is a great urgency to make life multiplanetary,” he said, according to the Times. “We have to do it while civilization is still strong.”
Although Musk’s plans to launch a manned mission to the Red Planet this year fell through, he now expects to settle a million colonists, including many of his own descendants, over the next 20 years.
Musk is already the father of at least 12 children, including three with NeuraLink director Shivon Zilis and another three with musician Grimes.
Tesla’s CEO, a proud “pro-natalist,” has previously warned of declining birth rates.
“Population decline due to low birth rates poses a far greater risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk proclaimed in a 2022 Twitter post.
The natalism movement, which has become closely intertwined with other far-right ideologies, often driven by conspiracy theories or racial science,
Other prominent proponents of birthrates, including Simone and Malcolm Collins, have warned that falling birthrates in Western Europe and North America pose a particular threat to those countries’ cultures. This sentiment was echoed by the New Zealand shooter in Christchurch in 2019, who wrote in his manifesto that it was about “birthrates.”
Musk, whose family built their wealth in apartheid South Africa, previously claimed that “civilization will crumble” in a speech in which he encouraged Tesla employees to have more children.