Can womanizing save the world?
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Elon Musk seems to view uncommitted sex as a way to address population decline. “Low birth rates will end civilization,” he recently posted on X. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a paternity test had confirmed Elon Musk to be the father of his 14th child.
Ashley St. Clair, the child’s mother, has gained prominence for refusing $15 million from Musk in exchange for keeping his paternity a secret. Because Musk ties financial support to nondisclosure agreements, it’s unknown how many women have children with Musk. “Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known,” the Journal reports.
Musk has brought needed attention to falling birth rates and elite contempt for children and childrearing.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat writes searingly about how the digital age has spawned a “fashionable antihumanism” in which virtual reality upstages the profound beauty of life and human connection. As people retreat into themselves through algorithms, they lack the will to perpetuate human culture — to multiply and replenish.
Douthat contends that unless we attend to depopulation, “languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail.”
Perhaps this is why, as the Journal reports, Musk refers to the children he has fathered as his “legion,” texting St. Clair about the need to use surrogates in order to “reach legion-level before the apocalypse.” But though Musk expressed interest in fathering more children with St. Clair, he also requested, through his Neuralink CEO Jared Birchall, that St. Clair leave his name off of their son’s birth certificate, later making that offer of financial support in exchange for keeping their relationship a secret.
“But perhaps more interesting than the presence of contracts between Musk and his harem of mothers is the apparent absence of traditional family ties,” writes Elizabeth Bruenig for The Atlantic. “He appears to acknowledge few, if any, bonds of genuine duty and responsibility among family members, much less bonds of care or love.”
“This is not the way,” posted Brad Wilcox in response to the Wall Street Journal article about Musk.
Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia, is best known for his research on how family life affects individual and societal flourishing. Wilcox has repeatedly emphasized that children do best across a variety of metrics when raised by their married parents. For example, Wilcox has found that “boys who don’t reside with their married fathers are, amazingly, more likely to go to prison than graduate from college.”
But where Musk seems to believe that money and genes matter more for societal flourishing than commitment and stability, the data tell a different story.
In her recent book, “The Two Parent Privilege,” economist Melissa Kearney argues that intact families not only produce healthier and happier children, but narrows class divides, improves social and economic mobility for entire communities and fosters social cohesion. She writes that “children who grow up without two parents in their home are at a substantial disadvantage relative to kids who do.”
As others have done, Kearney points to the “mounds of social science evidence” showing how being raised by a single mother hurts a child’s prospects for college, careers and eventually earnings. The damage, however, doesn’t end there.
“The odds of becoming a single parent are also substantially higher for children who grow up with a single mother, again illustrating the compounding nature of inequality,” argues Kearney. “It is not only that lacking two parents makes it harder for some kids to go to college and lead a comfortable life; in the aggregate, it also undermines social mobility and perpetuates inequality across generations.”
High rates of children being raised by their married parents has led researchers like Wilcox and Harvard’s Raj Chetty to describe Utah as a land of opportunity.
Stable marriages generate upward social mobility — not only for one’s own children, but for children in the larger community where you reside. In their famous 2014 study on social mobility in the United States, Chetty et al. found that “the fraction of children living in single-parent households is the single strongest correlate of upward income mobility among all the variables we explored.” The study found that Salt Lake City was among the top areas for social mobility in the country.
What this means is that Musk’s reluctance to commit to the mothers of his children is not only detrimental to those children (large fortunes notwithstanding); it weakens the surrounding social fabric on which others — particularly those without wealth — depend for forming successful families of their own. This is perhaps especially true given the outsized influence of his personal example on broader American culture — which is what makes this a public issue, rather than only a private matter for him.
Of course, fatherlessness can’t be reduced merely to the social upheaval it creates.
Rob Henderson, who recently completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge as a Gates scholar, writes, “I’ve come to believe that upward social mobility shouldn’t be our priority as a society. Rather, upward mobility should be the side effect of far more important things: family, stability and emotional security for children.”
Henderson’s best-selling memoir, "Troubled," details his climb up “the American status ladder” despite a “deprived and dysfunctional background” characterized by abandonment and abuse.
“I’ve come to understand that a warm and loving family is worth infinitely more than the money or accomplishments I hoped might compensate for them,” says Henderson.
Perhaps this is one reason why “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” says that “children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity” (emphasis my own).
In other words, committed fatherhood is not something which can be forfeit for a large enough sum of money; it is a divine right which children are owed.
Though some might see The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ continued emphasis on marriage as an outdated quirk, consider how saving humanity might well begin at the altar.
I wrote recently about Judith Wallerstein’s longitudinal study on the children of divorced parents. After following them for 25 years, Wallerstein found that two-thirds of children from broken families had decided never to have children.
So while Musk may be able to furnish the women he abandons with penthouses, denying his children committed fatherhood is a population strategy that doesn’t scale up if low birth rates are a symptom of family breakdown.
I’m with Musk on the need to shore up our abysmal birth numbers, but saving our civilization requires more than sex; it also requires commitment.
Marriage ensures that children inherit an unfragmented reality comprising both halves of the union which created them. We cannot expect to form healthy societies when we purposefully deny children this aspect of their spiritual, emotional and psychological wholeness.