The eugenics of the last century is returning under the guise of pronatalism, a concept promoted by the far right and by Silicon Valley broligarchs.
Not many people in the world are followed by Elon Musk on X. Even fewer are those with whom he interacts publicly. And only one has received a private message from him proposing to become the mother of his children – without ever having met him in person.
This happened some time ago to Tiffany Fong, a U.S. influencer specializing in cryptocurrencies and a Trump supporter.
As revealed by an investigation in the Wall Street Journal, Musk began following her and commenting frequently on her posts in the summer of 2024. The sudden attention from the most-followed man on X earned her hundreds of thousands of new followers and tens of thousands of dollars.
At some point, the entrepreneur privately asked her if she was interested in procreating with him; Fong, however, refused, saying she preferred a more traditional relationship. In retaliation, the richest man in the world stopped following and amplifying her on X, causing her considerable financial damage.
What makes it even more disturbing – if it weren’t already enough – is another circumstance: this is not the first time Musk has behaved this way.
Around the spring of 2023, he began pestering another pro-Trump influencer on X, Ashley St. Claire, with whom he shortly after started a relationship. When she became pregnant, Musk made it clear that he did not want to be recognized as the father.
In exchange for her silence on his paternity, the tycoon offered her an agreement that included $15 million and child support of $100,000 per month. There was also a rather peculiar request: the birth had to take place via cesarean section, which according to Musk would guarantee the child better brain development. St. Claire not only refused the deal, but also sued for sole custody and to establish Musk’s paternity.
Romulus (the name of the child) is the fourteenth Musk has had with four different women: six with his first wife Justine Wilson; four with Shivon Zilis, director of his neurotechnology company Neuralink; and three with singer Grimes, who says she nearly went broke after an exhausting court battle over custody.
The numbers of what Musk calls his “Roman legion” could actually be higher, because the world’s richest man tries to procreate as much as possible and by any means – natural conception, in vitro fertilization, sperm donation.
He does this because for years he has been literally obsessed with declining birth rates and the risk of Western depopulation.
“The Earth is almost empty,” he wrote on X. “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness,” he added, again on his platform. And again: “The collapse of the birth rate is by far the greatest danger civilization faces.” If things continue this way – as he has said on several occasions – we will meet the fate of the Roman Empire, which disintegrated as soon as “the Romans stopped making more Romans” (a minority thesis in historiography).
In short: for Musk, humanity risks extinction. The burden of guaranteeing the survival of the species falls almost entirely on people like him – ultra-rich individuals with high IQs.
This conviction – eerily reminiscent of dystopian plots like The Boys from Brazil or the more recent Alien: Earth – is also shared by other broligarchs.
Just to name a few examples: Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, said in an interview with the French newspaper Le Point that he has over one hundred children scattered across twelve countries. “I am the official father of six of them, whom I had with three different women; the others were born from my anonymous donations,” he specified. In 2024, Durov even offered – through a private clinic in Russia – free IVF with his sperm to all women under 38.
Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and grey eminence of Silicon Valley’s reactionary wing, has invested millions of dollars in experimental technologies to increase fertility and screen embryos. Overall, funding for startups in the sector skyrocketed: in 2022, it reached nearly $900 million, compared to $134 million in 2012.
In his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote that “our planet is dramatically underpopulated” and that “the global population could expand to 50 billion people or more, and then well beyond as we colonize other planets.”
This set of practices, suggestions, and theories has a specific name, which has resurged both inside and outside Silicon Valley in recent years: pronatalism.
According to a general definition, pronatalism is “any pro-birth attitude or policy that encourages procreation.” For pronatalists, having children is not an individual choice, but an imperative to ensure society’s well-being.
In many developed countries (Italy included), fertility rates have dropped well below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain population stability. While demographers do not share the apocalyptic scenarios of “civilizational collapse,” demographic decline is nonetheless a legitimate source of concern for various reasons – from economic stability to the sustainability of pension and welfare systems.
On the surface, then, pronatalism appears to rest on rational and scientific arguments. But as researcher Luke Munn writes in The Conversation, it has far more problematic and alarming implications when it becomes a political project “to encourage the reproduction of members of a specific civic, ethnic, or national group.”
For some pronatalists, the problem is not so much declining birth rates per se: it is rather who is reproducing, and who is not. In this sense, pronatalism is closely tied to nationalism, far-right ideologies, and conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement.”
In his first speech as vice president, JD Vance said he wanted “more children in the United States.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orb – n has repeatedly stated that “we do not want to become mixed-race peoples,” and for this reason he has promoted strongly identitarian pronatalist policies (which, however, have not achieved the desired results).
These discourses are frighteningly similar to those of past and present neo-Nazi terrorists. The manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, who in 2019 killed 51 Muslim worshippers in a double attack in Christchurch (New Zealand), began with this threefold invocation: “It’s the birth rates. It’s the birth rates. It’s the birth rates.”
David Lane, former member of the U.S. paramilitary group The Order, coined the infamous “Fourteen Words” mantra: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian Oslo and Ut – ya mass murderer, in his manifesto urged the establishment of state-run clinics to “breed” children of the “Nordic race.”
From this perspective, pronatalism is inextricably linked to eugenics – a term coined in 1883 by British explorer and anthropologist Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin. Inspired by animal breeding mechanisms, Galton encouraged people with “desirable” traits to reproduce, while preventing those with “undesirable” traits from doing so.
Undesirability was caused – according to Galton – by immutable genetic characteristics, which were nonetheless determined through arbitrary and utterly pseudoscientific criteria. Eugenics was also closely tied to racism, which at the time was a widely accepted and respectable “science.”
The concept’s popularity peaked between the 1910s and 1920s, thanks above all to The Passing of the Great Race, a book by U.S. lawyer Madison Grant. In his view, indiscriminate immigration was destroying the United States, ruining the “genetic stock” of the white American people.
To solve the problem, Grant proposed “a rigid system of selection” by eliminating “social waste” – identified as “criminals, sick, weak, insane, feeble-minded, and useless racial types.” It wasn’t necessary to kill them outright; sterilization would suffice.
Grant’s eugenic ideas took root not only in the United States, but also in the one place they absolutely should not have: Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler described The Passing of the Great Race as “my Bible” and took the lawyer’s proposals to their extreme consequences. To cleanse the “Aryan race” of impurities, he launched Aktion T4, the forced euthanasia program for people with disabilities, which caused between 275,000 and 300,000 deaths.
After the horrors of World War II, eugenics and scientific racism became forbidden words. But recently – as revealed by an investigation by the anti-racist NGO Hope not Hate – a troubling revival has been underway, promoted by associations and intellectuals lavishly funded by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
In public debate, note journalists Harry Shukman and Patrik Hermansson, racist and eugenic ideas are increasingly cropping up. They are not immediately recognizable as a century ago, but instead hidden beneath “layers of numbers and statistics that serve to give the appearance of academic rigor, when in reality they are distortions, misrepresentations, and manipulations of science.”
Very often, these ideas fall under the seemingly neutral, hyper-technological umbrella of modern pronatalism, which in many respects is indeed a reissue of old eugenics.
As Anne Rumberger and Marcy Darnovsky emphasize in a detailed article in Science for the People, some startups (also funded by Silicon Valley) are offering embryo analyses using “polygenic risk testing” powered by proprietary algorithms.
These embryos are classified based on the risk of developing diseases, disabilities, or even behavioral traits. The European Society of Human Genetics considers these tests scientifically unreliable, ethically questionable, and politically ambiguous.
Moreover, Rumberger and Darnovsky point out, the alleged reliability of polygenic risk scores “is limited by the racial biases of medical research,” since “almost all genomic studies they are based on are conducted on white populations of European origin.”
Nevertheless, polygenic tests are heavily promoted by Malcolm and Simone Collins, a U.S. Trump-supporting couple who have become the media-friendly public face of pronatalism.
The two – who so far have four children but aim for double digits – have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on IVF and embryo screening, with the goal of having “perfect” children by pre-assessing IQ or the risk of depression (a practice the scientific community does not consider possible). Just like the Silicon Valley tycoons, the Collinses promote “unrestrained medical research” to achieve the “mass production of genetically selected humans.”
Such a techno-solutionist approach is, however, fiercely contested by the traditionalist wing of the pronatalist movement, made up of Christian fundamentalists who consider conception legitimate only within the “natural family” and oppose any assisted reproduction techniques.
Beyond this significant divergence, pronatalism remains anchored to a patriarchal and fiercely anti-feminist worldview. If officially adopted as state policy, the burden of caring for and raising children would fall solely on women, who would then be pushed out of the labor market and effectively segregated at home.
This is not a remote possibility: Elon Musk has already tried it. According to the Wall Street Journal article cited at the start, the world’s richest man set up a kind of harem in a compound in Austin, Texas, asking mothers to move there to raise his “legion” in his place.
The enormous and brutal paradox of pronatalism lies precisely here: children are not considered individuals with their own dignity and worthy of paternal love, but tools in a supremacist and racist project of domination.
And if anyone among the offspring of the elect rebels against this predetermined destiny, they are declared dead even while alive – exactly as happened to Vivian Jenna Wilson, Musk’s transgender daughter, who exposed to the world the hypocrisy, lack of affection, and dangerousness of the man who claims he wants to save the human species.
LEONARDO BIANCHI
Leonardo Bianchi is a journalist and writer. He mainly collaborates with – Internazionale, – Valigia Blu, and – il Manifesto. He is the author of the newsletter – Complotti!, which focuses on conspiracy theories and disinformation. His latest book is – The First Drops of the Storm: Myths, Weapons, and Terror of the Global Far Right.