Over the weekend, Elon Musk appeared in a Twitter post to endorse the idea of taking the right to vote away from people without children.
The billionaire Tesla co-founder replied “Yup,” to a series of posts from Twitter user @fentasyl, which argued “democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents.”
The exchange came as Mr Musk continued his recent run of interacting with right-wing figures on the social network.
The posts from fentasyl themselves were a response to a previous post from Mr Musk.
On Saturday, in the comments under an Islamophobic nonprofit’s video, where commenters insinuated that single white women were turning France into a majority-Muslim country, Mr Musk claimed, “The childless have little stake in the future.”
The Independent has contacted Mr Musk for comment.
These opinions are hardly surprising for Mr Musk, who has long expressed concerns about declining birth rates in the US and the lack of “smart” people having enough children, views which critics have argued are verging on eugenicist.
In 2022, Musk, who has fathered nine children, wrote on Twitter that, “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.
Earlier this year, he elaborated, telling former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that society hasn’t “evolved” to respond to abortions and contraception, which the billionaire incorrectly claimed were invented in the last 50 years.
“I’m sort of worried that hey, civilisation, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilisation’s going to crumble,” Musk said. “The old question of, will civilisation end with a bang or a whimper?”
(In fact, the world population has doubled in the last 50 years to more than 8 billion, according to the UN, though the birth rate has slowed in some places.)
Observers argue that such so-called “natalist” views are often entangled with eugenicist ideas about intentionally manipulating future births to privilege and center certain groups of people.
Mr Musk has previously lamented that “smart” people aren’t having enough children.
“If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad,” he once told a biographer.
The tech billionaire has touted a prototype robot as a solution to a hypothetical world where declining numbers of workers are available to toil in Tesla factories.
For someone concerned with human civilization’s long-term longevity, Mr Musk lives a fabulously carbon intensive life. The carbon footprint from his 2022 private jet flights alone was 132 times greater than the average US resident’s total footprint, a doubly astounding figure given people in the US consume far more resources than less wealthy nations.
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