Elon Musk’s father suggests having babies should be more like breeding horses

Published

6 months ago

November 27, 2024

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The alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk framed the 2024 election and their bond has only deepened since.

Musk has been a regular fixture at the president-elect’s Florida mansion and the pair have introduced their families.

He has been privy to phone conversations with world leaders, consulted with Trump on his cabinet picks and even hosted him at Space X for the launch of the Starship rocket.

Musk will co-chair the new Department of Government Efficiency, charged with cutting government spending.

But how might the entrepreneur’s other views affect Trump policy?

The cause closest to Musk’s heart is pronatalism, a pro-birth political and personal ideology in which reproduction is the key goal of humanity.

Musk regularly posts on social media with fears about population decline, sometimes bordering on obsession.

“Population collapse is coming… Earth is almost empty of humans,” he wrote recently.

“Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy we should teach fear of childlessness,” he added.

The frequency of these posts has increased in recent months.

Musk has at least 11 children, by three different women. Some of them have spent time with him in recent weeks at Donald Trump’s home.

Few understand the origin of Musk’s pro-birth views better than his own father, Errol Musk – an engineer and businessman from South Africa, who has a strained relationship with his son.

I speak to Errol on a video call from his home near Cape Town.

“Elon doesn’t try to push his opinion across, but he will have an opinion,” he says.

Errol has seven children himself, ranging in age from Elon at 53 to his youngest daughter, who is five. He’s also a pronatalist.

“We’re not here to enjoy boating or flying or skiing or kite surfing, or something,” he says.

“We are here to continue being here. We should all be worried about declining populations, any country with any industry should be worried.”

Certain countries – like the United States, United Kingdom and Japan – do have ageing populations. But my conversation with Errol also reveals views which veer toward selective breeding.

I ask him about a comment Elon reportedly made to a biographer several years ago. Musk Jr apparently said: “If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, then that’s probably bad.”

I ask Errol Musk if that viewpoint is bordering on eugenics.

“I wouldn’t call it eugenics as such, but every nation has practiced a certain form of survival of the fittest.

“One need only go to England and go to the Cheltenham area, the horse breeding area, and say, ‘Look, we’re not going to breed the horses anymore by any form of standard. I’ve got a few old horses I’ve found in Nigeria and we’re going to just mix them with your race horses…’

“They’ll say, no, no, no, no, no,” he added.

A more sanitised version of pro-family politics took centre stage on the campaign trail.

At a rally, Donald Trump declared himself “the father of fertilisation” and vowed to make in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) free for anyone who needs it.

Sky News has been invited inside an IVF clinic in California, the world capital for fertility.

The fertility institute is in the Encino area of Los Angeles and allows patients to choose the eye colour of their baby as well as its gender.

Dr Jeffrey Steinberg was among the first fertility doctors to offer gender selection. He is taking future President Trump’s pledge to offer free IVF at face value.

“Donald Trump for better or for worse, tends to keep his word. And the sort of the pooh-poohing of what he was saying… I think it’s vanished because they’re realising that it’s probably going to happen. So all the fertility centres are gearing up for a huge surge.”

Elon Musk has donated millions of dollars to fertility research.

“Musk is a technocrat,” Dr Steinberg says. “He’s an intellectual genius in multiple areas. And everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

“There’s not much that evolves as quickly as Musk’s technology. But IVF has done that, and I think he’s going to find that very attractive.”

Not all agree that encouraging people to have as many children as possible is the way forward when it comes to population decline.

“There’s some catastrophic thinking that goes on in the tech bro space of Silicon Valley and so on, and it’s usually not very practically oriented,” says Philip Cohen, professor of sociology at Maryland University.

“If you really tried to promote pronatalism, inevitably what you end up doing is promoting a retrograde sort of anti-feminism,” he says.  

“So it ends up being how can we convince women to have more children, which ends up being how can we have women out of the workforce, at home more, married younger, all the things that are sort of rolling back the progress that we made with regard to women’s equality in the last 100 years. And so that’s my primary concern.

“The other is that it goes along with sort of a virulent nationalism that usually is not very far from racism and white supremacy.

“The idea of not just more births, but a certain kind of births, a certain kind of family. And it has not led to good outcomes in modern society when right-wing governments try to promote higher birth rates.”

While espousing his pronatalist views, Musk is navigating his own complicated family dynamic.

In the hills outside Austin, Texas, there are rumours he’s bought a multi-million-dollar compound to house some of his children and their mothers together, with his own property 10 minutes away.

Musk denies this is true.

But soon he could be helping to design family policy across the country.

World

Nicusor Dan beats hard-right favourite George Simion in surprise win in Romanian election

Published

5 hours ago

May 18, 2025

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Nicusor Dan beats hard-right favourite George Simion in surprise win in Romanian election

Pro-Western candidate Nicusor Dan has unexpectedly beaten hard-right populist George Simion in the Romanian presidential election.

Mr Simion, 38, and his rival – a centrist who’s mayor of Bucharest – faced off in the second round of the contest.

According to the official tally, Mr Dan was leading by nearly nine percentage points with more than 98% of the votes counted.

After exit polls suggested he wasn’t going to win, Trump-supporting Mr Simion rejected the result and said estimates put him 400,000 votes ahead.

Speaking after voting ended, Mr Simion said his election was “clear” as he posted on Facebook: “I won!!! I am the new President of Romania and I am giving back the power to the Romanians!”

Romania’s last election was annulled after its highest court ruled the leading candidate, nationalist Calin Georgescu, should be disqualified due to claims of electoral interference by Russia.

The result is surprising because in the first round, 38-year-old Mr Simion, founder of the right-wing Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), took 40.96% of the vote – almost 20 points ahead.

An opinion poll on Friday had it much closer, but still suggested the two men were virtually tied.

Mr Dan, a 55-year-old mathematician, is running as an independent and has pledged to clamp down on corruption.

He is also staunchly pro-EU and NATO, and has said Romania’s support for Ukraine is vital for its own security.

When voting closed at 9pm local time, 11.6 million people – about 64% of eligible voters – had cast ballots. About 1.64 million Romanians living abroad also took part.

The election is being closely watched across Europe amid a rise of support for President Donald Trump.

After polls closed, Mr Dan said “elections are not about politicians” but about communities and that in the latest vote “a community of Romanians has won, a community that wants a profound change in Romania”.

“When Romania goes through difficult times, let us remember the strength of this Romanian society,” he said.

“There is also a community that lost today’s elections. A community that is rightly outraged by the way politics has been conducted in Romania up to now.”

World

Israel to allow ‘basic quantity of food’ into Gaza to avoid ‘starvation crisis’

Published

6 hours ago

May 18, 2025

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Israel to allow 'basic quantity of food' into Gaza to avoid 'starvation crisis'

Israel has said it will allow a “basic quantity of food” into the besieged enclave of Gaza to avoid a “starvation crisis” following a near three-month blockade.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the decision was “based on the operational need to enable the expansion of the military operation to defeat Hamas”.

Gaza, where local authorities say more than 53,000 people have died in Israel’s 19-month campaign, has been under a complete blockade on humanitarian aid since 2 March.

It comes as global food security experts warn of famine across the territory and after a UN-backed report issued last Monday which warned one in five people in Gaza were facing starvation.

The statement from the prime minister’s office said it would “allow a basic quantity of food to be brought in for the population in order to make certain that no starvation crisis develops in the Gaza Strip”.

“Such a crisis would endanger the continuation of Operation ‘Gideon’s Chariots’ to defeat Hamas,” it added.

“Israel will act to deny Hamas’s ability to take control of the distribution of humanitarian assistance in order to ensure that the assistance does not reach the Hamas terrorists.”

It comes after a British surgeon working in Gaza said in a video to Sky News the enclave is now “a slaughterhouse” amid Israeli bombardment.

Israel has just ramped up its offensive in Gaza, with Palestinian health officials reporting at least 130 people were killed overnight into Sunday.

Israel Defence Forces (IDF) confirmed troops had begun “extensive ground operations throughout the northern and southern Gaza Strip”.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said 464 people had died in Israeli military strikes in the week to Sunday.

In a statement on Sunday, IDF said its air force struck “over 670 Hamas terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip to disrupt enemy preparations and support ground operations” over the past week.

Israel has launched an escalation to increase pressure on Hamas, seize territory, displace Palestinians to the south and take greater control over the distribution of aid.

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World

British surgeon working in Gaza says it is now ‘a slaughterhouse’ amid Israeli bombardment

Published

13 hours ago

May 18, 2025

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British surgeon working in Gaza says it is now 'a slaughterhouse' amid Israeli bombardment

A British surgeon working in southern Gaza has compared the region to a “slaughterhouse” because of the daily bombardment from Israeli forces.

Dr Tom Potokar, who is based at the European Hospital near Khan Younis in southern Gaza, offered his assessment of Israel’s military offensive after Palestinian health officials reported at least 130 people were killed overnight into Sunday.

Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have confirmed their troops have begun “extensive ground operations throughout the northern and southern Gaza Strip”.

In a video, Dr Potokar said it was “another day of devastation here in Gaza”, adding: “The stories coming from the north… absolutely horrific… particularly around the Indonesian Hospital.”

“I mean, it’s difficult to describe in words what’s happening here… [with the] constant sound of bombardment jets overhead.

“If Cambodia was the killing fields, then Gaza now is the slaughterhouse.”

His reference to Cambodia’s killing fields refers to when more than a million people were murdered in mass executions and buried by the extreme communist guerrilla group, the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, between 1975 and 1979.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said 464 people had died in Israeli military strikes in the week to Sunday.

Dr Potokar described the impact on those on the ground, saying: “We’ve been operating all morning so far and [treating] awful explosive injuries… [including] one young woman with leg fracture and shoulder fracture and a large wound on her buttock, who came in yesterday and is not yet aware that everyone in our family was killed in the onslaught.”

Israel has launched an escalation of its war in Gaza to ramp up pressure on Hamas, seize territory, displace Palestinians to the south and take greater control over the distribution of aid.

On Sunday, it announced and launched “extensive” new ground operations in Gaza.

It came after airstrikes killed more than 100 people, including dozens of children, overnight and into Sunday, hospitals and medics said, and forced northern Gaza’s main hospital to close.

A spokesperson for the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said: “Complete families were wiped off the civil registration record by Israeli bombardment”.

The ministry also said the bombardment had forced the closure of the Indonesian Hospital, the main hospital serving people in northern Gaza.

Nasser hospital, in the southern city of Khan Younis, said more than 48 people – mostly women and children – were killed in the area which includes tents sheltering displaced people.

In Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, at least 12 people were killed in three separate strikes, according to Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital and the Nuseirat camp’s Awda Hospital.

Meanwhile, the Gaza health ministry and the Palestinian Civil Defence – which operates under the Hamas-run government – reported that 19 people were killed in several strikes in Jabalia in northern Gaza.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the strikes.

Read more from Sky News:
How Israel has escalated Gaza bombing campaign

Ceasefire talks are taking place in Qatar this weekend – with Israel saying they involve discussions on ending the war as well as a truce and hostage deal.

A statement from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said any lasting truce must include the demilitarisation of Gaza as well as the exile of Hamas militants.

But a senior Israeli official added there had been little progress so far during talks in Qatar’s capital Doha.

Sky News Arabia reported Hamas had proposed freeing about half its Israeli hostages in exchange for a two-month ceasefire and the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

A Palestinian official close to the discussions said: “Hamas is flexible about the number of hostages it can free, but the problem has always been over Israel’s commitment to end the war.”