Billionaire Elon Musk has again sounded an alarm over the country’s dwindling birthrate, saying people should “celebrate having kids.”
The tech visionary has for years warned that population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization, yet he has recently focused more on domestic underpopulation. “USA birth rate has been below min sustainable levels for ~50 years,” Musk wrote in a May 24 Twitter post.
“Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have. I am a rare exception,” claimed the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who is also a father of eight. “Most people I know have zero or one kid.”
Writing in reply,
former Tennessee GOP congressional candidate Robby Starbuck said “America needs a culture shift that celebrates the nuclear family & having kids.”
“We just need to celebrate having kids,” Musk
responded.
His remarks come as the U.S. birthrate increased last year—the first time since 2014—up 1 percent from a year earlier, according to
newly released report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It shows the number of births declined by an average of 2 percent per year from 2014 to 2020, followed by a further drop of 4 percent from 2019 to 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last week, the billionaire rebuked claims that having fewer children is environmental-friendly to prevent global warming, calling it “total nonsense.”
“The environment’s gonna be fine even if we doubled the population,” Musk said during a virtual summit on May 20. “We can’t have civilization just dwindle into nothing.”
In 2019, American women in households with an annual income below the poverty threshold of $13,011 have seen the highest birth rate, at 74 births per 1,000 women, according to data from
Statista. In comparison, families making over $200,000 per year have the lowest birth rate—only 44 births per 1,000 women.
Official
statistics show that the estimated cost in 2015 of raising a child from birth through age 17 is $233,610, excluding the cost of college education, or almost $14,000 annually.
Musk expressed similar concerns in 2019 during a
seminar with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba founder Jack Ma in Shanghai. “Most people think we have too many people on the planet. But actually, this is an outdated view,” he said, describing population collapse as “the biggest issue in 20 years.”
