Elon Musk warns ‘Italy will have no people’ if falling birthrates continue
Billionaire Elon Musk has a simple messagę§e for Italy and other countries arę§ound the world who have reported falling birthrates in recent years: have more babies or face extinction.
Musk, who has repeatedly expressed his fear that population declines are among the biggest threats to humanityâs long-term survival, noted that Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in the worldâ, from the World Bank.
Musk expanded on his point in response to a tweet from cybersecurity researcher Andrea Stroppa, who tweeted a chart from the Italian National Institute of StatisticęŚs which showed birthrates in the county have steadily fallen since the 1960s.
âŕźşItaly will have no people if these trends continue,â Muskâ said.
Mđusk also shared a Wall Street Journal chart showing a âfertility slumpâ within the US, with data showing the country has remđained below a âreplacement levelâ by total fertility rate since the 1970s.
âUSA birth rate has been below min sustainable levels for ~50 years,â Musk tweetedđš.
âCđłontrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have,â he added. âI am a rare exception. Most people I know have zero or one kid.â
Musk sounded the alarm about falling birthrates as recently as March. When an interviewer asked the Tesla CEO to reveal his âbiggest fear,â đMusk said humanityâs falling birthrate was âtroubling [him] for many years.â
âI spent a lot of time talking about the birthrate thing,â Musk with the Axel Springer CEO Mathias⤠DĂśpfner. âThat might be thđąe single biggest threat to the future of human civilization.â
âMost people in the world are operating under the false impression that weâve got too many people. This is not true. The birth rate has been dropping like crazy,â Musk added later in the interview. âUnfortunately, we have these ridiculous population estimates from the [United Nations] that đšneed to be updated because they just donât make any sense.â
Musk iđ şdentified two other top existenđtial threats to humanity: the possibility of âartificial intelligence going wrongâ and the rise of what he called âreligious extremism.â
Meanwhile, Musk may find sđome solace in â¨the most recent trends within the United States.
The Centers for Disease Control and Preventionâs (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics revealed this week that US birth rates increased in 2021 for the first time in seven years, ticking upwardŕź by 1%.