Steph Deschamps / August 29, 2022
The world's richest man, Elon Musk, himself a father of ten, on Monday called on his contemporaries to make more babies but also to exploit more oil and natural gas.
Believe me: the baby crisis is a big problem, the 51-year-old entrepreneur told reporters in Stavanger, in southwestern Norway, where he was to attend an energy conference.
Asked about the biggest challenges facing the world, the founder of the American electric car manufacturer Tesla certainly cited the transition to renewable energies but he immediately followed up with the birth rate, one of (his) favorite concerns, perhaps less known.
In Western societies as well as in extremely populous countries like China, the birth rate is declining, due in part to an aging population.
It's important that people have enough babies to keep civilization going, he said.
It is said that civilization could die with a bang or a whimper. If we don't have enough children, we will die with a whimper (wearing) adult diapers. It will be depressing, he added.
Yes, make more babies, he concluded. At least make enough babies to maintain the population. We don't want the population to drop so low that we end up extinct.
Divorced three times, Mr. Musk is the father of ten children, one of whom died at 10 weeks. One of them, a transgender daughter, recently filed an official request to change her last name along with her gender in order to cut all ties with her father.
And the American press recently revealed that he had twins in November with a Neuralink executive, a few weeks before the birth of Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, whom he had with the singer Grimes. She is the little sister of X Æ A-12, a boy.
Arriving in Stavanger in a private jet, Elon Musk also felt that the planet still needed fossil fuel sources.
I think realistically we need to use oil and gas in the short term, because otherwise civilization would collapse, he said, especially these days with the sanctions against Russia.
It would be justified at this time to explore more hydrocarbons in Norway, he also estimated.
The largest producer of oil and natural gas in Western Europe, the Scandinavian country is now much sought after by other European countries in the grip of an energy crisis and eager to break their dependence on Russian gas.