Elon Musk’s pinned tweet is from May. It’s a chart from The Wall Avenue Journal demonstrating that the US fertility level has been down below the “replacement level” considering that the 1970s. “USA birth level has been down below min sustainable ranges for ~50 several years,” was Musk’s contribution to the tweet. He’s been speaking about populace drop for decades, in fact. He’s even talked about it as just one of the biggest troubles struggling with humanity, and his remedy is uncomplicated: have far more young children, everyone!
Say this for Musk: dude practices what he preaches. Insider documented this week that Musk experienced twins final November with Shivon Zilis, a star in the AI planet, a longtime colleague of Musk’s at OpenAI and Tesla, and a existing government at Neuralink. The twins arrived to be in the news this week simply because of an April submitting in Texas to transform their previous identify to Musk. They had been born in late November, a couple weeks before Musk and Grimes experienced their second kid. (In circumstance you are counting, that’s now nine known little ones in the Musk clan.)
Musk hasn’t technically confirmed the tale, but… he kinda confirmed the tale? “Doing my very best to assistance the underpopulation disaster,” he tweeted on Thursday early morning. “A collapsing birth price is the largest threat civilization faces by much.” He also tweeted about wanting to create “a really configurable Robovan for men and women & cargo,” and now I have a whole lot of inquiries and theories about what a self-driving Tesla minivan might be like. But we’ll help save all those for yet another working day.
There’s been a great deal of chat about the Musk household above the past few of months. Musk’s daughter Vivian improved her previous title to Wilson previously this 12 months, indicating “I no for a longer time are living with or would like to be connected to my organic father in any way, condition or form.” The publication of that improve — and the rationale for it — coincided with a scarce quiet period of time from Musk on Twitter. (To be obvious, there’s no evidence all those two matters are related, but the timing is certainly noteworthy.)
There’s certainly practically nothing erroneous with obtaining loads of children, and we’re not here to litigate Musk’s romantic preparations. But you just simply cannot hear about all this devoid of also thinking about Musk’s other perform within his businesses — which goes past just secretly possessing young ones with a single of your staff members. We’ve protected this thoroughly listed here at This Week in Elon, but there are the allegations that SpaceX paid out $250,000 to avert a flight attendant from talking up following Musk uncovered himself and propositioned her for sex (which he has loudly denied). And there are also the very long-standing stories of cultures of sexual harassment in just the two SpaceX and Tesla. These are not isolated incidents or uncomplicated misunderstandings. This is just how Musk operates — and how his corporations operate by extension.
In an open letter to SpaceX leadership very last month, a group of workforce questioned for, amongst other items, “safe avenues for reporting” and to “uphold apparent repercussions for all unacceptable actions, no matter whether from the CEO or an employee starting up their 1st working day.” The message from within Musk’s corporations has been both loud and clear: there want to be guidelines, and individuals regulations need to be enforced equally and forcefully no make a difference your job title. There’s nonetheless precisely zero proof that Musk plays by the regulations, acknowledges people policies, or even lets policies to exist in the very first position. Musk does as Musk would like — all the time, in all places. And if you talk out? You get fired, as a quantity of the letter writers did.
Anyway, in other news… Musk invested the week chatting about his love for socks, thieving memes about the Fourth of July and 7-Eleven, having a couple of of his children to see the pope and marking the second with a picture that appears to be like everyone was photoshopped into, and generating the case that having to Mars could be a uniting pressure in the exact way that having to the Moon the moment was. He’s even again to pumping Dogecoin, even though it turns out not even Musk can save the crashing prices of crypto.
The Washington Write-up described that Musk’s Twitter acquisition may possibly be falling apart but did not give any cause why other than “Elon is still mad about bots.” Meanwhile, Twitter carries on to go out of its way to say it does not have a bot trouble. As at any time, you really should presume the deal is continue to happening right until verified if not and that Musk is going to try out anything he can to get a lessen price tag.
We also bought a couple of compact hints this 7 days about how a Musk-owned Twitter may well work. When Alex Berenson announced he’d been reinstated to Twitter, Musk questioned what Berenson meant by the phrase “the pressures that the federal government could have positioned on Twitter to suspend my account.” He also responded to a yr-aged Glenn Greenwald thread about social media censorship and absolutely free speech by calling it “troubling …” Musk has produced himself out to be one thing of a cost-free speech absolutist and requires issue with the concept of social platforms stifling anyone’s voices.
Which helps make it weird, really, that he appeared to have no thoughts about what took place in India this week. The Indian govt has been tightening its guidelines for online speech and demanded Twitter eliminate certain accounts and posts for violating its new legislation. Twitter complied just ahead of the authorities-imposed deadline but also sued the Indian governing administration in the hopes of getting judicial protection from these kinds of orders in the foreseeable future.
We have been stating for a though that Musk’s full “I love cost-free speech no make a difference what but also comply with the principles of governments” issue was never going to really function in the genuine globe. He does not even personal Twitter however, and in this article we are! Although he’s commiserating with persons who sense canceled around their negative tweets, totally free speech and govt oversight are coming into immediate conflict in 1 of the world’s largest nations, and Musk says nothing. Which is roughly what we’ve appear to anticipate when it comes to these really hard decisions.
The factor with Musk is that, in his thoughts, the finishes usually justify the suggests. Generally. He has these huge goals — make fuel cars and trucks obsolete, get to Mars, deal with traffic, have an understanding of the human brain, on and on — and has demonstrated he does not especially treatment what it usually takes to accomplish them. At times that indicates telling your personnel to be okay with grueling stints at do the job from time to time it means yelling at them to come back to the business or give up and in some cases it indicates forcing them to tolerate a sexist, discriminatory perform lifestyle in the name of getting the position accomplished more rapidly. He runs his firms seemingly by the seat of his trousers due to the fact he just doesn’t treatment about it — only the conclude benefits subject.
And, as ever, the 1 factor Musk looks to know for certain is that he can constantly just tweet via the small-expression stuff. With each scandal, it gets to be a little much more obvious why he sees Twitter as so precious: it’s an unparalleled narrative-control machine with which he can explain to 100 million folks at a time that everything’s a lie or a joke or not as massive a deal as you think or irrelevant mainly because all we should care about is Mars. Twitter is, to borrow a phrase from Apple, Musk’s actuality distortion subject. And for that, $44 billion is a discount.
