SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has dramatically declared on social media that declining global fertility rates “will lead to mass extinction of entire nations.”
This isn’t the first time the SpaceX CEO, known for his controversial opinions, has chimed in on issues of birth rates, fertility and the global population. The billionaire has himself fathered 12 children as of August this year.
In January 2022, in a series of posts on X, he said: “We should be much more worried about population collapse,” following up with: “UN projections are utter nonsense. Just multiply last year’s births by life expectancy. Given downward trend in birth rate, that is best case unless reversed.” He then added: “If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars.”
U.K.-based charity Population Matters published a 2022 report on the impact of Musk’s social media posts on this topic, noting: “Since at least 2017, Elon Musk has been tweeting and speaking regularly about his concerns regarding population ‘collapse.’ Due to his high media profile and social media following, his views are widely disseminated and read. His claims are in some cases inconsistent with the existing evidence and/or expert opinion, and his opinions are open to challenge on a wide range of fronts.”
Elon Musk at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2024 on June 19 in Cannes, France. Musk is known for his concerns about population collapse, most recently posting about what he saw as the ‘mass extinction’ of humanity.
Marc Piasecki/Getty Images
Musk’s “mass extinction” comment was in response to Marko Jukic, a senior analyst at Bismarck Analysis, who said: “A fertility rate below 1.6 means 50% less new people after three generations, say 100 years. Below 1.2 means an 80% drop. The U.S. is at 1.64. China, Japan, Poland, Spain all below 1.2. South Korea is at 0.7—96% drop. Mass extinction numbers.”
Jukic was replying to a September 8 post from an account called Birth Gauge, whose profile description says: “Tracking the global fertility decline.” The post included an image titled “Birth and Fertility Data 2024.” The table displays “Total Fertility Rates (TFR)” for 2015, 2020 and 2023, and a forecast for an unspecified future year.
In response to questions about the provenance of the data contained in the table, the account posted that it had taken data from multiple sources including the U.K. government and a peer-reviewed German academic journal.
The table includes data for many European countries, as well the U.S., Australia and several Asian nations. Many countries show declining fertility rates from 2015 to 2024.
Some countries, like Ireland and Iceland, showed slight increases in fertility rates between 2023 and 2024, while France has the highest TFR among European countries listed for 2024 at 1.63, South Korea and Hong Kong have very low TFRs, and the U.S. maintains a relatively high TFR compared to most European countries.
The TFR is the average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime. A TFR of 2.1 is considered the “replacement level” in developed countries, meaning the population would remain stable (ignoring migration and mortality factors).
Professor Stein Emil Vollset from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), lead author of a recent study that concluded “the world is approaching a low-fertility future,” said in an article in The Lancet that this was not necessarily negative.
“In many ways, tumbling fertility rates are a success story, reflecting not only better, easily available contraception, but also many women choosing to delay or have fewer children, as well as more opportunities for education and employment,” said Vollset.
Population Matters added in its 2022 report that it was “deeply concerned that the ‘population collapse’ narrative promoted by Mr Musk may embolden those who seek to restrict reproductive freedoms, and divert attention from the urgent need to address the human welfare conditions and injustices which drive continued population growth.”
The declaration of “mass extinction numbers” from Jukic and Musk is considered an exaggeration by many scientists and academics; the term “mass extinction” is typically used in the context of species disappearing entirely and applying it to human population decline due to low fertility is hyperbolic.
Experts commonly agree that were human extinction to occur, it would likely be related to “nuclear weapons and lethal synthetic biology.”
Newsweek reached out via email to X for comment from Elon Musk.
