Tesla CEO Elon Musk is seemingly poking fun at the news that he secretly fathered twins last year with one of his top executives while he was still expecting his daughter with ex-partner Grimes. On July 7 on Twitter (which he recently tried to acquire via hostile takeover), Musk tweeted a series of thoughts that seem to confirm the news.
"Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far," Musk wrote. Adding to the thread, he continued, "Mark my words, they are sadly true." But the posts didn't end there. "Maybe Tesla should make a highly configurable Robovan for people & cargo?" he joked, before closing with, "I hope you have big families and congrats to those who already do!"
Some critics writing for The Washington Post and Financial Times derided the so-called "underpopulation crisis" as a sexist tactic to shame women for prioritizing their careers and autonomy over having children. In January, Harper's Bazaar's Ella Alexander criticized the hyper-fixation on declining birth rates as absolving "the powers that be from any responsibility." Alexander wrote, "If we women shoulder the blame then it means that governments don't have to address and remedy the huge structural issues that act as barriers to motherhood." Those issues included struggles tied to accessible childcare, housing, medical care, and more.
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