Elon Musk, CEO of the company formerly known as Twitter (now X), has reportedly donated to a fertility and population research project in Texas.
According to Bloomberg, Musk, who’s been vocal about his belief that population collapse could end humanity, gave $10 million to the Population Wellbeing Initiative (PWI), a project housed at the University of Texas at Austin, through his charitable arm the Musk Foundation.
Musk funded a two-day PWI conference last October, Bloomberg reports, but the organization didn’t initially disclose the 52-year-old billionaire’s involvement.
A joint program between UT Austin’s Population Research Center and its economics department, the PWI’s website describes it as “a network of researchers” who conduct foundational work in economics, demography and social welfare evaluation. Specifically, the PWI investigates and explores issues around fertility, parenting and the future of population and economic growth, as well as infant and child welfare.
Business Insider notes that a paper produced by the PWI and co-written by its director, Dean Spears, includes a projection that — based on declining fertility rates — “humanity is four-fifths over” and that, without a reversal, it’s possible “that humanity depopulates with cruelty.”
Musk has fathered at least 10 children with three women, including the pop star Grimes and a top executive at Neuralink, a brain-implant company that he helped to co-found.
His pronatalism, reportedly, was borne out a desire to prevent the demise of what Musk considers “advanced society” through the declining fertility of the intellectually gifted. Business Insider has reported previously that Musk believes that wealth is directly linked to IQ and has urged “all the rich men he knew” to have as many children as possible.
“Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” Musk once tweeted in response to reporting around the Neuralink controversy. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”