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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Arwa Mahdawi

Elon Musk wants everyone to have big families like him – but who’s going to pay for them?

Elon Musk with Grimes
Elon Musk with Grimes, the mother of two of his children. Photograph: Charles Sykes/Invision

Here’s a fun maths problem for you. If each of Elon Musk’s children reproduced at the same rate as their father, and each of Boris Johnson’s children had as many kids as they have siblings, how long would it take for the world to completely run out of resources?

It’s an impossible question to answer, of course: Musk and Johnson are constantly surprising us with new offspring. Last week for example, news broke that Musk fathered two children in 2021 with a top executive at Neuralink, his brain-machine interface company. Those babies were reportedly born just weeks before Musk welcomed his second child (via surrogate) with the singer Grimes. He now has 10 known children; his first child tragically died at the age of 10 weeks.

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