In a techno-libertarian twist on traditional pronatalism, Silicon Valley elites position reproduction as an ideological instrument to ‘future-proof’ innovation, based on a privileged upper-class position.

 

When I was writing this piece in late 2024, I did not anticipate just how starkly Elon Musk’s politics would unfold in the months that followed — from leading the D.O.G.E. initiative and publicly mimicking Nazi salutes, to Tesla’s dramatic stock crash. There is now an explicit alignment between Musk’s pronatalism, as discussed in the piece, and a broader authoritarian political turn. Under the newly reinstated Trump administration, Project 2025’s programme is now being implemented. One of Trump’s first executive orders was to support IVF access, framing it as a recognition of “the importance of family formation and that our nation’s public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children”. This underscores the political stakes of pronatalist discourse and highlights the urgency of sustained, critical engagement with the politics of family, reproduction, and demographic anxiety. As these ideologies move from Silicon Valley to the centre stage of institutional power, research tracing their dimension and scope is needed.

Everyone knows Elon Musk by now – the CEO of Twitter/X, SpaceX, Tesla, and richest man in the US. But have you heard about his son with the interesting name? His daughter who spoke out against his transphobic comments? Musk’s fans and the public seem equally interested in his family dynamics – after all, not everyone can say they have fathered 14 children with 4 different women. Through his family politics, Musk projects a specific vision of Silicon Valley success: children outnumbering start-ups

A surprising number of Silicon Valley’s big personalities, like Musk, Peter Thiel or Sam Altman, promote pronatalism. Proponents of pronatalism have traditionally voiced their concerns regarding population decline, encouraging people to have as many (biological) children as possible to repopulate a given territory. Silicon Valley’s pronatalists follow that trend, which is unsurprising considering its historical connections with the eugenics movement. Many advocates of pronatalism in the Valley are far-right nationalists, who the other tech-pronatalists welcome in the name of pluralism. Because of its problematic nature, Quinn Slobodian sees pronatalism as the latest frontier in the culture wars, stating that many have “used multiculturalism against assimilationist forms of liberalism, and Musk is pulling the same maneuver only in a language of birth rates.” Other commentators see Silicon Valley’s current pronatalist turn as a Ponzi scheme that burdens those who provide reproductive labor, but which will likely fizzle out on its own. At the other end of the political spectrum, pronatalism has been branded as the solution to the decline of humanity, for instance, by the right-wing populist network FOXX. Clearly, pronatalism is not a neutral idea but a power-laden ideology. Instead of ‘writing against’ or evaluating the movement, I want to focus on exploring how this view of reproduction aligns with key characteristics of Silicon Valley Ideology – entrepreneurship, techno-utopianism, and libertarian ideals – to understand its latest iteration and re-emergence. 

Reproduction as capital

In 2022, Musk stated that he believes population decline to be an even more pressing issue than environmental collapse. Demographic trends have historically been an important topic of discussion for political economists, from Thomas Malthus to F.A. Hayek. Malthus and James Steuart were concerned that a growing population would have a negative impact on living conditions as well as on the ecological and economic system. On the contrary, other political economists thought of population growth as synonymous with rising living standards and economic development. Arthur Lewis initially determined surplus labour (from infinite population growth) as a key condition for development. In a similarly optimistic vein, Hayek stipulated that “an increase of population may now, because of further differentiation [allowed by technological development], make still further increases of population possible”. The question of what a ‘viable’ (i.e. employable and ecologically sustainable) population looks like was absent from Hayek’s reflection. 

Crucially, this question is still missing from recent Silicon Valley musings on ever-expanding population and implicit economic growth. Resting on an appeal to a tech-affine and highly educated workforce, the hope is that Silicon Valley’s children birth unprecedented innovations and inventions. Musk’s pronatalism, Slobodian suggests, is less about supporting universal procreation – it neglects global inequalities and the socioeconomic impacts of larger families — and more about fostering a selective innovation-driven elite. Classic pronatalism was concerned with securing the reproduction of nation states. Silicon Valley’s version seems instead concerned with ensuring the entrepreneurial motivations of a white inventor while reinforcing socioeconomic hierarchies, as the people invited to populate the world are mainly upper-class tech moguls. Musk explicitly equates progress with racially marked elite reproduction in tweets on migration numbers compared to ‘American’ birth rates (a framing that aligns him with the racist ‘Great Replacement’ theory) or most recently his stance on H-1B visas. 

Start-up technology for a dynasty

This focus on elite reproduction is tied to Silicon Valley’s libertarian techno-utopianism. Silicon Valley pronatalism relies on techno-utopianism, dismissing population growth’s ecological and social challenges by trusting in technological solutions. Colonizing other territories and planets, as Musk actively pursues as Carla Ibled and Alina Utrata discuss in other parts of this blog series, is seen as the answer to Earth’s ecological overshoot. 

Technology can also help with minimizing reproductive labor. Pronatalist family models incorporate, even rely on technology for their childrearing, thereby transferring parenting responsibility away from the ‘nuclear family’. Western cultures’ biologically determined descent is being reworked through assisted reproductive technologies (ART), like surrogacy, and the legal frameworks adjusted to it, like formal adoption. Many of the children conceived by Silicon Valley’s pronatalists, including at least five of Musk’s children, are born via surrogacy, IVF or other reproductive medicine.

In their quest for alternative futures, Silicon Valley’s tech giants turn their investing powers to experimental bio-start ups and fertility treatments, which amplify concerns about genetic selection’s potential for demographic engineering. The Valley pronatalists have dismissed these concerns by counterintuitively arguing that gene selection will actually guarantee greater human diversity. Polygenics enable parents to optimize the trait they value the most, which tech pronatalists believe will be different depending on one’s cultural group. This reinforces the tight link between this iteration of pronatalism and technology, and justifies calling this constellation techno pronatalism. To be clear, it is not about expanding a family’s, the individual child’s or communal well-being. Rather, it is about the long-term future of an abstract mass of people, whose good needs to be secured, often in the spirit of effective altruism. It is about building dynastic power that proves that we can save ourselves through technical intervention in which children are agents of entrepreneurial legacies. 

Philosophies in practice?

Tech moguls like Musk have the resources to dismantle systemic barriers to procreation. The primary hurdle is the double-bind of employment and care work. Silicon Valley tech companies try to address that by offering benefits, like expanded parental leave, baby bonuses and mentoring programs. Musk announced he would tackle this in his companies by “significantly” increasing childcare benefits. However, his companies lag behind others and he made the news yet again in 2023 with rolling back some of his childcare policies. Taking the example of paid parental leave, Tesla is offering 9 weeks that can increase up to 16 in certain circumstances, which Twitter/X was made to align with. For reference, the standard paid parental leave in the US is 12 weeks, so only 4 weeks away from the maximum Musk implemented. The additional month might entice employees to have children but with many of the rules applying only to the birth parent, women would be the main beneficiaries of these policies. Yet, women are still underrepresented in big tech, with men outnumbering women 7 to 3, so how big the impact of these policies is remains questionable.

Moreover, they also encourage traditional gender roles. When having many biological children, the birth parent will have to shoulder most of the physical reproductive labour and the risk is high to take on a lot of the unpaid care work, coercing especially marginalized women (intersectional with race and class) into a dichotomy of mother or worker, as feminist scholars like Angela Davis or Silvia Federici note. The conflict within pronatalist family dynamics to navigate expected roles as entrepreneurs and parents is a conflict that is not just playing out on company policy level but also in current US politics. For instance, the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade and now the re-election of Donald Trump have explicitly furthered a wider pronatalist, anti-feminist agenda. 

Libertarian family values 

If having many children were a private ideology that a random guy and a couple of his friends followed, the resurgence of pronatalism would probably not be talked about. However, because it is Musk and Silicon Valley, the influence of the philosophy has far-reaching, political consequences. How much control the state should have over private matters like reproduction has been heavily debated. States have been involved in managing demographic trends for a long time whether by limiting natality, like China with its one child policy (1980-2016), or by encouraging specific forms of socio-economic orders, like the reproduction of households as the central category for welfare as Melinda Cooper details. One of the most popular examples of state-led pronatalism today is the policies led by Viktor Orban in Hungary that introduce baby loans, anti-abortion legislation and tax breaks for large families. While these target a similar (upper) middle class, the policies foreground a clear nationalist agenda and the techno-optimist elements fade into the background here. This creates its own tension between nationalism and neoliberalism as Dorit Geva describes in her work on Ordonationalism.

What about Musk’s political ideology beyond techno-libertarianism? Musk, who previously-described his populist tactics as ‘centrist’ and ‘politically moderate’, endorsed Trump for a second administration, despite his previous statements that he would “prefer to stay out of politics”. Silicon Valley is often thought of as right-wing or libertarian, and Musk is not an exception despite his companies heavily relying on government contracts. This unique blend of politics, business, and techno-optimist interests plays out in his decision to get involved in politics too as it directly links to a pronatalist shift in public policies.

Think tanks like the Center for Renewing America and the Heritage Foundation have collaborated as part of ‘Project 2025’ to propose a series of policies  that promote having children and raising them in nuclear, Christian families, as well as advocate limiting access to contraceptives, banning no-fault divorce and ending policies that subsidize single-motherhood. One person with similar views is Brit Benjamin, a self-described “Silicon Valley divorce lawyer & divorce coach offering high-touch family law advocacy” – and coincidentally the ex-wife of Patri Friedman, Milton Friedman’s grandson and co-founder of Thiel’s charter cities Seasteading Institute. She speaks about the dangers of no-fault divorce at natalist conferences and writes in favor of ectogenesis (the gestation of a fetus in an artificial womb, currently banned in the US). The circular logic of neoliberal and libertarian public policy runs in the Silicon Valley family. 

Old privileges and contradictions

Pronatalism aligns with Silicon Valley ideology’s basic tenets: entrepreneurial techno-utopianism with a sprinkle of libertarian policy engagement. It is an ideology that transcends the Valley’s borders, shaping societal fabric by framing reproduction as a moral imperative for a privileged elite, positioning some more worthy of existence than others in the tradition of demographic engineering, while ignoring how it reinforces existing inequalities as well as the actual limits to population growth.

When looking closely at the latest iteration of pronatalism in Silicon Valley, it is almost impossible to separate neoliberalism, techno-utopia, public policy and family dynamics. It thus makes sense to find techno pronatalism emerging in this setting. Techno pronatalism envisions a future driven by elite reproduction under the guise of progress, leaving marginalized groups behind. 

Much of this is a paradox in itself. Musk supports more regulation while advocating for private initiative. Similarly, he sponsors pre-industrialization family structures enabled by technology, promoting the choice to have as many children as you can with any method necessary but also limiting structural conditions for the same. The promise of new technologies to bring equity, save humanity from environmental ruin and bring about a peaceful era has come up largely empty in the present. 

The role of procreation fits a pattern of internal conflict that ironically makes Silicon Valley ideologies’ roots in colonial patriarchy most visible. What techno pronatalism proposes is not new or innovative. It describes a demographic shaped by tech elite privileges that plays into traditional patterns of societal, intersectional exploitation. By highlighting these inner contradictions, we can better understand why techno-pronatalism emerges in big tech and critique its societal implications.

 

Anna Rohmann is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths researching financial technology and (digital) financial inclusion through ethnographic and intersectional frameworks. She focuses on the interplay between retail investors, start-ups, content creators, technologies, and wider socio-economic structures. Her broader research interests lie at the intersection of the (digitized) economy with language, queerness, online communities, and social change. Anna is on the editorial board of Anthways Journal, a Research & Marketing Coordinator for the Political Economy Research Center (PERC), and a member of the TikTok Ethnography Collective.

 

This is the twelfth contribution of PERC’s series on the Silicon Valley ideology. If you wish to get involved or would like to pitch an idea for a contribution, get in touch with our editor Carla Ibled (carla.ibled[at]durham.ac.uk).