Tech Oligarchs and the Rise of Silicon Valley Pronatalism

This post is part of a series of contributor perspectives and analyses called "The Coming Age of Tech Trillionaires and the Challenge to Democracy." Learn more about the call for contributions here, and read other pieces in the series as they are published here.

Why is it dangerous when corporate executives, entrepreneurs and investors with enormous wealth and power collectively control the development and deployment of our most pervasive technologies? Most answers to this question focus on the technologies themselves, or the ways in which the interests of these individuals, with their vast wealth and influence, are counter to the interests of democracy. Most Tech Policy Press readers are well aware that their social media platforms shape opinions, their money buys elections, and their AI models seem poised to dominate the economy.

But among a certain subset of Silicon Valley elites, a stranger set of ideas has emerged in recent years that corresponds to much more significant ambitions to reshape society than merely to propagate artificial intelligence across every aspect of life and work or to subjugate governments to corporate power. Understanding these ideas and their implications is important to resisting the power and influence of these individuals.

One of these ideas is pronatalism. Connected to the political, economic, and technological visions held by a number of billionaire tech oligarchs, the Silicon Valley strain of pronatalism—a movement that urges people to have as many children as possible—is tied to ambitions around the advance of artificial intelligence and even the conquest of other worlds. But more immediately, it is connected to the desire among certain elites to direct the future of the species.

Elon Musk, for instance, has not just been inserting himself and his wealth in national and global politics—he is also a pronatalist. He has fourteen children with five different women—that we know of. He has been accused of abusive tactics to control both these women and their children. His estranged daughter, Vivian Wilson, alleged that he used in-vitro fertilization to father boys rather than girls—hoping that his sons would copy his own behavior and thus multiply his genetic offspring. Musk himself has described this as a project to create a “legion” of babies “before the apocalypse.” He has tweeted obsessively about the danger of falling birth rates, and pushed the pronatalist cause in various media appearances.

Explaining Silicon Valley pronatalism

Pronatalists generally believe that if birth rates in the United States and across Europe and East Asia continue to decline, it could lead to economic disaster, or even to the end of civilization as we know it. Some pronatalists promote controversial measures, such as genetic modification or restricting access to birth control to increase birth rates. Others go further, endorsing eugenics or the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely asserts there is an effort to replace white populations with nonwhite immigrants that must be countered by white people having more children.

Pronatalism is not a homogeneous movement, though. Recent profiles of the movement distinguish between a “tech” and a “trad” wing, with the latter inspired by religious commitments that are often incompatible with pro-technology beliefs. Quiverfull Christians, for instance, are committed to pronatalist beliefs, but reject the use of IVF or genetic engineering.

We can also distinguish between liberal and illiberal forms of pronatalism. Liberal pronatalism focuses on incentives that make the choice to have children attractive, and help people put it into practice—think generous parental leave, free child care, and good infrastructure for children. Illiberal pronatalists think of having many children as a duty, and thus consider obligations and prohibitions rather than incentives.

The strain of pronatalism that is most prominent among certain Silicon Valley elites is decidedly illiberal.

While Musk’s views may seem crass and fringe, he is not alone among the tech oligarchs in his desire to increase birth rates. Peter Thiel has invested in fertility technologies, and Marc Andreessen writes in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto:

We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods. We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.

The Silicon Valley strain of pronatalism was represented at the second edition of NatalCon, a conference dedicated to the pronatalist cause held in Austin, Texas, in March 2025. The program featured the investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinavasan alongside “race-science promoters and eugenicists,” according to the Guardian. And last year, it was even discussed in San Francisco at the conference Reboot 2024: The New Reality, on a panel that featured various right-wing figures.

Silicon Valley pronatalist ideas are often linked to effective altruism or longtermism, strains of thinking that advance radical visions of the future. As Luke Munn writes in The Conversation, for pronatalists, children are often merely vehicles “for a political project”—and this political project tends toward the far right and sometimes, outright white supremacy.

Longtermism, a perversion of utilitarianism that philosopher Émile P. Torres, a former longtermist, has called “the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today," regards problems such as extreme poverty, epidemics, and genocides as mere blips in the history of humanity. Such things should be of little concern, as long as we ultimately fulfill our destiny to populate the stars. To get there, longtermists say, we’ll need better versions of humans who can coexist with superintelligent AIs.

Not all longtermists are pronatalists, and not all pronatalists are longtermists. But the tech oligarchs are often both. Their philosophy views human beings not primarily as people, but as numbers in a cosmic equation. This philosophy may seem to have little political purchase. But just as certain accelerationist ideas about AI have found purchase in the second Trump administration, pronatalism is having its moment too. It has the attention of the Trump regime, with Vice President JD Vance demanding “more babies,” President Donald Trump declaring himself the “fertilization president,” and the White House pondering how to “persuade” women to have more children.

From pronatalism to technofascism

The threat of tech oligarchy is typically framed as one of oppression through technology—a dystopia where we are manipulated and controlled by the technologies that pervade our lives. But pronatalist tech oligarchs would also strip us of access to technologies that enhance autonomy. And they have been teaming up with nationalists and religious fundamentalists in order to achieve this goal.

Reproductive health care such as abortion and contraception are technologies that have radically reshaped how we can take control of our lives. Illiberal pronatalism would restrict these in favor of a duty to have more children. The fall of Roe v Wade and subsequent push for draconian forced-pregnancy laws in many parts of the United States, the purge of reproductive health information from government websites, and political pressure on reproductive health clinics—these are all part of the pronatalist playbook. Tech oligarchs that endorse illiberal pronatalism also implicitly endorse these measures.

The ongoing demonization of queer minorities, especially trans people, fits right into this as well. Transition presupposes access to certain technologies—from online communities to medical care to civil registries and passports. Transition is also an exercise of personal autonomy that is directly opposed to the notion that our anatomical markers decide our role in society. It goes against the idea that the value of a person should be expressed as a number or their role in sexual reproduction—how many babies they birthed, or how many dollars they contributed to the economy. But in the pronatalist vision of the future, people who defy their assigned reproductive role are considered worthless—or a threat.

This vision does not just target women or trans people—it targets everyone. Silicon Valley pronatalism sorts humans into groups, each with their own predetermined value. This is a fascist mindset, and it is crucial to recognize illiberal pronatalism as a fascist ideology—and to resist the superwealthy and powerful men who would impose it on us in the name of “saving humanity.”