Elon Musk says he’s ‘banging the baby drum’ and warns we could be like Japan which saw a population decline of 600,000 and adds the country will ‘disappear’ if trends continue
Elon Musk said that he’s been ‘banging the baby drum’ for a while and warns that the US could face a fate similar to Japan’s if plunging fertility rates don’t improve.
‘I’m always banging the baby drum,’ Musk, who has fathered eight children with multiple wives, said. ‘Where do you think people come from?’
Last year, Japan saw its population plunge by more than 600,000 due to declining fertility rates and a rapidly aging population.
‘Some magical f**king people factory?’ the Tesla CEO joked in a conversation with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley. ‘The stork, the baby store?’
‘The thing that tends to happen is that once the birth rate starts to go down, it accelerates.’
Scroll down for videos
Japan, which has seen its birthrate decline for many years, could potentially ‘disappear’ according to Musk. Above: Data from the Japan Bureau of Statistics reveals the decline of population and negative rate change since 2010 in Japan
‘The current trend is not good. The number of humans is not trending well,’ Musk said.
‘Japan is a leading indicator. Last year they lost 600,000 people,’ he continued.
The country’s population dropped for the eleventh consecutive year and was down by 644,000, according to its Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.
The overall population fell as deaths exceeded births by 609,000 and as people who moved out of the country outnumbered those who moved in by 35,000.
Worldwide, fertility rates and sperm counts have been dropping, potentially setting up some countries for population decline. Musk, who has fathered eight children, said he’s always ‘banging the baby drum’ in a recent interview (above) with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley
The official data also showed that the proportion of people age 15 to 64 stood at a record low of 59.4 percent while that of those age 65 or older hit a record high of 28.9 percent.
‘If that trend continues, Japan will flat-out disappear,’ Musk warned. ‘Hopefully it doesn’t.’
‘China will have a problem, too,’ the SpaceX founder said, noting that country’s policies around controlling family size.
According to one analysis, China’s fertility rate has continued to decline, even as the country has allowed families to have up to three children after abandoning its longtime one-child policy.
Musk has long said that families need to have more children in order to keep populations from declining across the world. In the United States, fertility rates have been declining since the 1970s. Musk has the tweet pinned
‘A lot of people are under the impression that the current number of humans is unsustainable on the planet,’ Musk said.
‘That is totally untrue. The population density is actually quite low,’ the tech billionaire noted.
Musk also said that as societies tend to become wealthier and less religious, couples have fewer children.