A Column on the Principle of Population

Elon Musk wants you to have more babies. Should you?

- By Virginia Heffernan. Photograph by Shawn Michael Jones

People don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble,” proclaimed Elon Musk from a Tesla factory late last year. As usual, he was treated as an oracle. Deepening the effect, he added, preposterously: Mark my words.”

Musk spoke his truth at a Wall Street Journal event while hyping his proposed Tesla bot, an android that performs grunt work. Only a bot army, he said, can meet the corporate need for laborers willing to work without rest, meals, or complaint. (Human dignity is a drag on profits.) But until the bots are up and running, Musk’s Squid Game still needs flesh-and-blood workers.

“The fundamental constraint is labor,” Musk said. "There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough: There are not enough people. One of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate.”

Musk tends to be an experimental talker, and he’s of course passionate about trolling; his utterances, like those of a Fed chair, don’t describe reality so much as create social fluctuations. To fact-check Musk’s statements, therefore, is to misunderstand their import. (Though, for the record, a United Nations study debunked his demographic math a week later.)

Still, Musk’s histrionics ("civilization is going to crumble”) and pomposity ("mark my words”) are intriguing because they uncannily echo the population hysterics of 50 years ago. With a key difference: The 1970s Nostradamuses were afraid of too many babies. Musk is afraid of too few.