The alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk framed the 2024 election and their bond has solely deepened since.
Musk has been an everyday fixture on the president-elect’s Florida mansion and the pair have launched their households.
He has been aware about cellphone conversations with world leaders, consulted with Trump on his cupboard picks and even hosted him at Area X for the launch of the Starship rocket.
Musk will co-chair the brand new Division of Authorities Effectivity, charged with chopping authorities spending.
However how may the entrepreneur’s different views have an effect on Trump coverage?
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Elon Musk secured the boldness of Donald Trump throughout his election marketing campaign. Pic: Reuters
The trigger closest to Musk’s coronary heart is pronatalism, a pro-birth political and private ideology through which replica is the important thing objective of humanity.
Musk frequently posts on social media with fears about inhabitants decline, generally bordering on obsession.
“Population collapse is coming… Earth is almost empty of humans,” he wrote just lately.
“Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy we should teach fear of childlessness,” he added.
The frequency of those posts has elevated in latest months.
Musk has at the very least 11 kids, by three completely different girls. A few of them have frolicked with him in latest weeks at Donald Trump’s residence.
Few perceive the origin of Musk’s pro-birth views higher than his personal father, Errol Musk – an engineer and businessman from South Africa, who has a strained relationship together with his son.
I communicate to Errol on a video name from his residence close to Cape City.
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Errol Musk
“Elon doesn’t try to push his opinion across, but he will have an opinion,” he says.
Errol has seven kids himself, ranging in age from Elon at 53 to his youngest daughter, who’s 5. He is additionally a pro-natalist.
“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.”
Sure international locations – like the US, United Kingdom and Japan – do have ageing populations. However my dialog with Errol additionally reveals views which veer towards selective breeding.
I ask him a few remark Elon reportedly made to a biographer a number of years in the past. Musk Jr apparently stated: “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 want solely go to England and go to the Cheltenham space, the horse breeding space, and say, ‘Look, we’re not going to breed the horses anymore by any type of customary. I’ve acquired a number of outdated horses I’ve present in Nigeria and we’ll simply combine them together with your race horses…’
“They’ll say, no, no, no, no, no,” he added.
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Elon Musk and his kids
A extra sanitised model of pro-family politics took centre stage on the marketing campaign path.
At a rally, Donald Trump declared himself “the father of fertilisation” and vowed to make in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) free for anybody who wants it.
The fertility institute is within the Encino space of Los Angeles and permits sufferers to decide on the attention color of their child in addition to its gender.
Dr Jeffrey Steinberg was among the many first fertility docs to supply gender choice. He takes future President Trump’s pledge to supply free IVF at face worth.
“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 thousands and thousands of {dollars} to fertility analysis.
“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 a lot that evolves as rapidly as Musk’s know-how. However IVF has executed that, and I feel he will discover that very engaging.”
Whereas espousing his pronatalist views, Musk is navigating his personal sophisticated household dynamic.
Within the hills outdoors Austin, Texas, there are rumours he is purchased a multi-million-dollar compound to accommodate a few of his kids and their moms collectively, together with his personal property 10 minutes away.
Musk denies that is true.
However quickly he may very well be serving to to design household coverage throughout the nation.
