Since April, observers and detractors of Elon Musk believe that he is obsessed by Twitter (TWTR).
The world's richest man made a $44 billion bid to acquire the microblogging site on April 14.
Since then, he has engaged in a war of words with the management of the platform, whom he accuses of having lied about the figures relating to the spam bots or fake accounts. For the past two months, Musk has vented against fake accounts. Some experts see it as a tactic to renegotiate the price of the operation because the financial markets have fallen since his offer.
Spam bots or fake accounts are however an important issue because advertisers pay attention to the number of users present on the platforms on which they want to sell their products and services. But Twitter has always said the figures it provides might not reflect the exact number of fake accounts that exist on the network.
The Twitter saga even eclipsed tech tycoon's baby Tesla, to the point where investors began to question whether the premium electric vehicle maker was still Musk's top priority.
But if Twitter has indeed occupied the billionaire entrepreneur's mind, there's another topic vying for his favor: the decline of the world population, particularly in rich countries.
'Demographic Disaster'
The mogul is almost obsessed with it. In recent months, he has sounded the alarm about population decline in Japan, Italy, South Korea, Hong Kong and more recently in China.
But he has the impression that his alarms are ringing in the void and therefore does not hesitate to repeat them. So, repeat until it is heard by public authorities, the media and the general public.
"Past two years have been a demographic disaster," Musk wrote on Twitter on June 14, speaking about the U.S. The post brought back a previous tweet from May in which he was already worried about the declining birth rate in the United States.
"USA birth rate has been below min sustainable levels for ~50 years," Musk tweeted at the time.
He had based his statement on a Wall Street Journal article on the subject. The article, citing official figures, reported that the total fertility rate -- the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime -- in the United States remained below the replacement threshold of 2.1 -- the level a generation needs to replace itself.
'A World Party Day'
The atypical serial entrepreneur -- he founded the rocket company SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink -- believes that one of the ways to remedy this major problem is to have children and celebrate humanity.
"I mean, I’m doing my part haha," Musk said in another tweet on June 14.
This last sentence can be understood in different ways. The first is that the billionaire is already doing everything to warn about this issue.
And he also follows his own advice since he is the father of seven children --Y, X, Griffin, Xavier, Kai, Saxon and Damian. Y, the last one, was born in December.
In May, Tesla's chief executive officer pushed back preconceived and often widely held ideas that having a child is expensive or that making the choice not to have children is because we want to save the environment.
"It's somewhat counterintuitive, because people will say, like, well, 'it's too expensive to have a baby'. No. The wealthier they are, the fewer kids you have; the more educated you are the fewer kids you have," he said.
"It basically seems as though as soon as you have like, urbanization and education beyond a certain level and income beyond a certain level, birth rates plummet. And so as countries get wealthier, their birth rates plummet."
A recent study projects that the world's population will peak at 9.7 billion in 2064, before decreasing to 8.8 billion in 2100. But, if we followed the curve of the growth rate of world population, say demographers, would begin to decline around 2060.
The annual growth rate of world population was 2.1% in the 1970s. Today, this rate is only around 1%. And it should go down to 0 between 2060 and 2070, demographers say.
On June 11, a Twitter user suggested we should have a party to celebrate humanity "once in a while."
Musk chimed in and shared that his son Saxon had already thought of something similar.
"My son, Saxon, suggested having a party for the whole world, a world party day!," the entrepreneur said.
