The Silicon Valley Elite is quietly appointing future ancestors.
As America's abundance rate continues to reach record lows, it is well below the “exchange rate” from generation to generation, but the birth movement has found a foothold in the world of technology.
Elon Musk, who is currently believed to have 13 children, is openly supporting the movement, believing that it pumps babies out to combat social disruption. Openai CEO Sam Altman I said“Of course I'm going to have a large family,” he says, investing in experimental fertility techniques.
More moguls have quietly expressed their support behind the closed doors of private and investor meetings, according to Malcolm Collins, a supporter of outspoken pronalism.
Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz Alum Balaji Srinivasan are among the high-tech titans speaking at Natalcon in Austin in March, The tickets are for $1,000 each.
“People willing to commit to sacrifices [the movement] Collins, a former Stanford University-educated venture capitalist, told the post.
He estimates that at least half of birthists are in the world of technology.
Collins, 38, and his wife Simone, 37, are parents of four children under the age of five, and plan to save as many children as nature as they do. They believe that economic stagnation, tensions in social services, overall cultural degradation, and futuristic fertility technology are the path to salvation.
They have a “Base Camp” podcast, five co-authored books, and Pragmatist Foundation, They co-founded it as a resource for information on surrogacy, reproductive techniques and childcare.
The couple met in San Francisco in 2012, and Malcolm was pursuing a Stanford MBA. Simone, who holds a master's degree in technology policy from Cambridge, said she doesn't want a family.
“I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and obviously didn't want to have children, but instead I wanted to start a company and live alone forever,” explained Simone. Her back.
Her outlook changed when Malcolm took the stint working for a Korean VC company.
South Korea Declared population decline It is predicted that last year's national emergency will only have four grandchildren per Korean living today. President Yoon Sak Yeol extended parental leave and provided housing scholarships to families with newborns.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the elderly masses are straining social interests and elder care infrastructure. Number of elderly people It's 4 times more Since the 1970s, the proportion of children has been reduced by half.
Malcolm worried that the West would not be long behind. At 1.6 births per woman, the US is well below the rate of replacement of 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain population levels.
After a failed attempt to conceive naturally, Collins ran out of IVF savings in 2017.
“It's heartbreakingly expensive to make embryos that lived on a mattress on a studio floor,” recalls Malcolm. “People say, 'I don't have the money to have kids.' What they really mean is, “I don't want to sacrifice my quality of life.”
Simone's Kids' POV has shifted dramatically. “To put short-term comforts on the possibilities of bringing human life to the world with more travel, more vacations, better places to live, better food, and more short-term comforts on their every experience. It's ridiculous,” she said.
The couple, who live in the countryside of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, was originally planned for five to seven children, but now they are hoping that a “very big” family will join Octavian George. Torsten Savage, 3; Titan Invictus, 2; and Industrial Americans, 1.
“[Kids] Malcolm said. “You can start industrializing the parenting process…it's like a child's factory farm.”
All the kids are dressed in the exact same clothes and are organized in baskets based on their age. A gift under the family Christmas tree is a falling hand from an elderly sibling.
“everyone [else] I'm parenting in hard mode with one or two kids,” Malcolm said.
Robin Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University, agrees that population collapse is an imminent emergency, warning that a decline in fertility could overturn the economy and slow innovation .
“Innovation is a central part of the modern economy where every generation has more wealth and technology,” he told the Post. “That's a rather dramatic idea that life afterwards is virtually not superior to previous ones.”
That's a concern that seems to resonate particularly with innovators like Musk. Tweet in 2022 “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much greater risk to civilization than global warming.”
He has it too Natalcon's shared footagethe annual Pro Natalist Conference, to his hundreds of millions of X-followers.
Malcolm and Simone Collins are expected to speak at Natalcon 2025 in March with influencers like Srinivasan, scholars and live-ocean nationalists.
Kevin Dolan, the founder of the conference, has taken great care to balance the speaker's gender, but said that four of his female presenters dropped out to give birth last year.
According to Dolan, it became a bit of a single scene, with aspiring parents joining. Lillian, a former 22-year-old director of the Pragmatist Foundation, attended last year but did not find a partner.
“The natural woman's intuition is wanting a child,” Lillian, who asked to withhold her last name for privacy reasons, told the post. “I'm only unusual in that I've escaped from a pathological modern environment that artificially suppresses women's desire to have many children.”
A self-proclaimed nomad who bouncing between Boston, Austin, San Francisco and Washington, DC, she discovered an online birth movement while studying education at Harvard University.
“If you don't think that having children is a good thing in the first place, I think it's a very bad sign for the state of American culture,” Lillian said.
Only half of young people aged 18 to 34 Plan to have kidsand 35% of people who don't cite climate change. “Fate is very bad,” lamented Lillian.
As the birth movement grew, Collins became a lightning bolt of controversy. The couple was criticized online after Malcolm reportedly slapped his 2-year-old son in an interview with the Guardian in May.
he He later defended himself“We lightly 'bop' our kids, direct them, and show that we're crossing boundaries. “It's like this.
Their movement is also being criticized Flirting with eugenics. Simone and Malcolm transferred their fifth child via IVF in January after sending DNA to several startups to select embryos. Includes genomic predictions funded by Altmanscreens for predisposition to diseases like Alzheimer's disease and cancer – running in Simone's family – mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and depression.
“When people come to me, I love it and they say, 'You're massacring people who are depressed,'” Malcolm said. “I don't think I've ever met someone who's depressed like, 'This is great' and 'I want more people to get depressed.' ”
They also purchased information about predispositions in children, such as brain fog, the ability to cope with stress and intelligence.
“People find it very painful,” Malcolm said. “They ask, “Why do you pay to make your child smarter?” And I said, “Why do you pay to go to the preparations that your child has sat down “Do you want to pay?”
Fertility is becoming a pet project in Silicon Valley. It was about $874 million. Invested in a fertility treatment-related startup Only in 2023.
Alife, an IVF tool that selects embryos for implantation using artificial intelligence, raised $22 million. Meanwhile, ectolife Plan to get your baby to get pregnant Uses an artificial uterus. The AI-generated promotional video depicts hundreds of babies growing in warehouse capsules.
Openai CEO Sam Altman; Invested in conceptionStartup Works to make egg cells From other cells in the body, it means that even two men can make babies, viable eggs and even two men.
Skype co-founder Jaan Tallin, even his father of six About $500,000 donations to Collins charity through a fund that donors wisely support.
“[Pronatalism] We need to look at the data and break away from social norms. This is what Silicon Valley people love more than anything else,” Malcolm explained. “You could hardly make anything better for them. They can say that the data is true, but it also shocks the others in the room.”
Collins is literally a religion for them because they are so devoted to their technological vision.
The couple explained the techno-worship, a faith that they invented and officially registered in the IRS this year. Techno Pritanism, a secular Jewish-Christian denomination that is drawn into Muslim, Mormon and Zoroastrian traditions, is “a duty to improve between generations.”
They also promised their devoted followers – many of them are childless, male technical optimalists: Name the Pragmatist Foundation Beneficiary of your will, and your genes are preserved for future generations It will be done.
“We get your full genome sequence…and put it in the founding formation of what we create as a society,” Malcolm said. I mentioned it in a recent podcast episode. “If we succeeded, perhaps one day in the near future, people will use it to create humans or create people in an AI environment.”
And they are already coordinating the next generation of birthers by creating “indexes” of pronatalist families whose children want to date and reproduce with each other.
Their move may still be small, but Malcolm believes he and Simone could become Techno Adam and Eve.
“If Simone and I had eight children and we built an intergenerational culture, for just 11 generations, we would have more offspring than humans on Earth today.”
