Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

The thing about working at a place that's "extremely hardcore" (and I've done it a few times) is that you need a few things to make it work. The single most important thing you need, IMO, is some sort of animating idea, a reason, a mission.

So far it seems Elon has offered the following:

1) "I'm Elon Musk. I'm a fucking genius. You're not. Fuck you."

2) "Twitter sucks. The people who work at Twitter are shit."

3) A bunch of half-baked ideas sourced off the internet, implemented without any apparent understanding of software development or social media beyond the superficial.

None of them are particularly compelling IMO.

The other, critical difference is that he has owned the company for barely three weeks.  He strode into a company that had a certain culture, threw out half the staff, and imposed a major culture change on the other half.  The likelihood that a significant portion of the existing staff were on board with his new culture was, and has proved to be, very low.

It's a different case when you have a company that is known to be "hardcore".  The applicants to those companies self-select.  They know what they're getting into.

The people who worked for Twitter a month ago signed up for a much different bargain.  I'm not surprised there's a mass exodus as a result of this.  Also, I feel really bad of the people who are still there only because of their life or visa situation.

[Jacob]

With SpaceX and Tesla, at least the mission itself was pretty compelling, at least for a lot of people.

Exactly.

"We're going to space again!" - super fucking compelling if that's your jam.

"We're making electric cars and saving the planet! Cutting edge tech that no one has done before!" -  also very compelling.

Twitter I guess might be kind of compelling, but it's not rockets.

Twitter could be compelling, I think, but Musk's pitch appears to be "every thing you did before is shit and you're lazy! Prove to me that you're good enough for me."

That said, maybe he has something that's compelling to some folks? Maybe some sort of "we'll make the all-in-one app" or something like that... but even that's more compelling for Musk's bottom line than as an aspiration, unless it's combined with significant financial upside for the people who stick it out.

I do expect that at least at SpaceX, Musk probably got away with a lot of bullshit because people would put up with a lot to work there because its, you know....a rocket company.

Agreed. Same with Tesla I think, though the shine may be wearing off there.

[Syt]

Maybe some sort of "we'll make the all-in-one app" or something like that...

I'm having flashbacks to those old apps that rolled ICQ, IRC, Messenger etc. into one unified client

[Admiral Yi]

Debt holders are presumed to be able to protect themselves through contractual covenants, but they usually don't because for structural reasons debt is usually dumb. Also, written contract covenants can often be evaded.

AFAIK there has never been a junk market crash.  That suggests to me junk lenders know to price.

[Syt]

https://www.businessinsider.com/pronatalism-elon-musk-simone-malcolm-collins-underpopulation-breeding-tech-2022-11

Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids.

Inside the movement to take 'control of human evolution.'

Sitting in their toy-filled family room on a sunny September afternoon, Simone and Malcolm Collins were forced to compete with the wails of two toddlers as they mapped out their plans for humankind.

"I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn't fix the problem, we could be gone," Malcolm half-shouted as he pushed his sniffling 18-month-old, Torsten, back and forth in a child-size Tonka truck.

Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents' calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.

If they succeed, Malcolm continued, "we could set the future of our species."

Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are "pronatalists," part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. It's a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times' opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen bantered about on "The Joe Rogan Experience." It's also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "You will not replace us" to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: "It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates."

Google searches for "population collapse" spiked this summer, after Musk continued to raise the issue in response to Insider's report that he'd fathered twins with one of his employees. According to the United Nations, more than a quarter of the world's countries now have pronatalist policies, including infertility-treatment benefits and "baby bonus" cash incentives. Meanwhile, a spate of new assisted reproductive technology startups are attracting big-name investors such as Peter Thiel and Steve Jurvetson, fueling a global fertility-services market that Research and Markets projects will reach $78.2 billion by 2025.

I reached out to the Collinses after I received a tip about a company called Genomic Prediction, where Musk's OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman was an early investor. (Altman, who is gay, also invests in a company called Conception. The startup plans to grow viable human eggs out of stem cells and could allow two biological males to reproduce. "I think having a lot of kids is great," Altman recently told an audience at Greylock's Intelligent Future event. "I want to do that now even more than I did when I was younger.")

Genomic Prediction is one of the first companies to offer PGT-P, a controversial new type of genetic testing that allows parents who are undergoing in vitro fertilization to select the "best" available embryos based on a variety of polygenic risk factors.

The Collinses became the public face of the technology after being featured in a May Bloomberg article, "The Pandora's Box of Embryo Testing Is Officially Open." After the piece went live, Malcolm said, they began hearing from wealthy pronatalists around the country.

"We are the Underground Railroad of 'Gattaca' babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids," Malcolm told me.

The Collinses invited me to stay at their home in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, before we'd even spoken on the phone. (Following our first call, in which I disclosed that I was single but hoped to have children one day, Simone also emailed to invite me to join their matchmaking network for "high-achieving" individuals: "As you can probably tell, we're heavily invested in helping people have families, as the headwinds against having kids are strong these days!")

We are the Underground Railroad of 'Gattaca' babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids.

While I didn't fill out the matchmaking form, which listed both "Four +" and "As many as possible" as options for how many children I wanted, I did take them up on a visit to their 18th-century farmhouse. Upon arrival, I was greeted at the gate by The Professor, a brown corgi with a slightly manic air, followed by Malcolm, cheerful and clean-cut in a black polo.

Inside, Simone, statuesque even one month shy of her delivery date, wore her pregnancy uniform of a crisp white oxford shirt, a long black skirt, Doc Martens, and red lipstick (ignoring, she would later tell me, her mother-in-law's plea not to "dress like a fucking pilgrim" in front of the press). Their wardrobes, Simone told me later, are meticulously curated to project the kind of gravitas their work requires. Beneath their thick, black-rimmed glasses — hers round, his rectangular — the couple look, as they would put it, "biologically young."

Together they write books and work in the VC and private-equity worlds. Simone has previously served as managing director for Dialog, the secretive retreat cofounded by Thiel. While they relate to the anti-institutional wing of the Republican Party, they're wary of affiliating with what they called the "crazy conservatives." Above all, they are focused on branding pronatalism as hip, socially acceptable, and welcoming — especially to certain people. Last year, they cofounded the nonprofit initiative Pronatalist.org.

Torsten, 1, whose nickname is "Toastie," got his name from his mother's Scandinavian heritage. Octavian, 3, was named after the ruler who ushered in the Roman Empire. Hannah Yoon

An obsession with producing heirs is hardly a new phenomenon. Elites have used lineage to consolidate money and power for most of human history. But as couples in the developed world are increasingly putting off parenthood until later in life — or abandoning it altogether — people like the Collinses are looking for hacks to make large families feasible in a modern, secular society.

They both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. After all, a political minefield awaits anyone who wanders into this space. The last major figure to be associated with pronatalism was Jeffrey Epstein, who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. Genetic screening, and the underlying assumption that some humans are born better than others, often invites comparisons to Nazi eugenic experiments. And then there's the fact that our primary cultural reference point for a pronatalist society is the brutally misogynist world of "The Handmaid's Tale."

The Collinses, who call themselves "ruthless pragmatists," consider the inevitable backlash a small price to pay.

"We're frustrated that one of the inherent points of this culture is that people are super private within it," Simone said. They not only hope that their transparency will encourage other members of the upper class to have more children; they want to build a culture and economy around the high-birth-rate lifestyle.

The payoff won't be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will "become the new dominant leading classes in the world."

The tech industry's biggest players have been preoccupied with their legacies for years. In the 2010s, the longevity craze swept Silicon Valley and industry titans like Jeff Bezos, 58, Sergey Brin, 49, and Larry Ellison, 78, poured billions of dollars into biotech companies they thought could help them defy death. Jeffrey Epstein reached out to scientists about freezing his head and penis to be revitalized hundreds of years later, while Peter Thiel, 55, was said to have sought blood transfusions from the young. (In response to the rumor, Thiel stated: "On the record, I am not a vampire.")

Antiaging research has had some success in targeting specific diseases, but as the Ellisons and Bezoses of the world get older, the chance of radical life extension in their lifetime becomes more unlikely. So some are turning to the next best thing: their progeny. For people who believe deeply in the genetic heritability of traits, passing on what they see as their superior DNA can be the ultimate path to influence.

The Genomic Prediction cofounder Stephen Hsu told me he knew many ultrahigh-net-worth, high-birth-rate parents.

"With everything these guys do, whether it's their investments or even their social lives, they're applying a very analytic, quantitative way of thinking. And that goes for reproduction too," Hsu said.

In 2018, Brin and his then-wife, Nicole Shanahan, who faced fertility troubles of their own, founded the Buck Institute's Center for Female Reproductive Longevity. Thiel, who has at least one child with his partner, has invested in the egg-freezing startup TMRW and a new period-tracking app called 28, which has stirred controversy over its affiliation with an antiabortion publication. Ellison, meanwhile, who has two children in their 30s, has reportedly resumed having kids — with his 31-year-old girlfriend.

While pronatalism is often associated with religious extremism, the version now trending in this community has more in common with dystopian sci-fi. The Collinses, who identify as secular Calvinists, are particularly drawn to the tenet of predestination, which suggests that certain people are chosen to be superior on earth and that free will is an illusion. They believe pronatalism is a natural extension of the philosophical movements sweeping tech hubs like the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas. Our conversations frequently return to transhumanism (efforts to merge human and machine capabilities to create superior beings), longtermism (a philosophy that argues the true cost of human extinction wouldn't be the death of billions today but the preemptive loss of trillions, or more, unborn future people), and effective altruism (or EA, a philanthropic system currently focused on preventing artificial intelligence from wiping out the human population).

What these movements all have in common is a fixation on the future. And as that future starts to look more and more apocalyptic to some of the world's wealthiest people, the idea of pronatalism starts to look more heroic. It's a proposition uniquely suited to Silicon Valley's brand of hubris: If humanity is on the brink, and they alone can save us, then they owe it to society to replicate themselves as many times as possible.

"The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children," Simone said.

According to tech-industry insiders, this type of rhetoric is spreading at intimate gatherings among some of the most powerful figures in America. It's "big here in Austin," the 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey told me. Raffi Grinberg, a pronatalist who is the executive director of Dialog, said population decline was a common topic among the CEOs, elected officials, and other powerful figures who attended the group's off-the-record retreats. In February, the PayPal cofounder Luke Nosek, a close Musk ally, hosted a gathering at his home on Austin's Lake Travis to discuss "The End of Western Civilization," another common catchphrase in the birth-rate discourse.

Meanwhile, the Collinses said a mutual friend had been encouraging them to fly to Austin to meet with Claire Boucher, the musician known professionally as Grimes who is the mother of two of Musk's children. (Grimes, who follows about 1,470 people on Twitter, followed the Collinses while this piece was being reported.) It makes sense considering that Musk, who has fathered 10 known children with three women, is the tech world's highest-profile pronatalist, albeit unofficially. He has been open about his obsession with Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol ruler whose DNA can still be traced to a significant portion of the human population. One person who has worked directly with Musk and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article recalled Musk expressing his interest as early as 2005 in "populating the world with his offspring."

Musk has increasingly used his public platform to advocate the cause, tweeting dozens of times in the past two years about the threat of population decline. "If the alarming collapse in birth rate continues, civilization will indeed die with a whimper in adult diapers," he tweeted in January.

These worries tend to focus on one class of people in particular, which pronatalists use various euphemisms to express. In August, Elon's father, Errol Musk, told me that he was worried about low birth rates in what he called "productive nations." The Collinses call it "cosmopolitan society." Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie "Idiocracy," in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing the unintelligent to populate the earth.

"Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have. I am a rare exception," he wrote in another tweet this past May. "Most people I know have zero or one kid."

Musk was echoing an argument made by Nick Bostrom, one of the founding fathers of longtermism, who wrote that he worried declining fertility among "intellectually talented individuals" could lead to the demise of "advanced civilized society." Émile P. Torres, a former longtermist philosopher who has become one of the movement's most outspoken critics, put it more bluntly: "The longtermist view itself implies that really, people in rich countries matter more."

A source who worked closely with Musk for several years described this thinking as core to the billionaire's pronatalist ideology. "He's very serious about the idea that your wealth is directly linked to your IQ," he said. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article, also said Musk urged "all the rich men he knew" to have as many children as possible.

Musk's ties to the EA and longtermist communities have been gradually revealed in recent months. In September, text logs released as part of Musk's legal battle with Twitter showed conversations between Musk and the prominent longtermist William MacAskill, who works at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, where Musk is a major donor. In the messages, MacAskill offered to introduce Musk to Sam Bankman-Fried, a now-disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur who had donated millions of dollars to longtermist organizations.

MacAskill has never explicitly endorsed pronatalism, and he declined to be interviewed for this article. He did, however, devote a chapter of his best-selling book, "What We Owe the Future," to his fear that dwindling birth rates would lead to "technological stagnation," which would increase the likelihood of extinction or civilizational collapse. One solution he offered was cloning or genetically optimizing a small subset of the population to have "Einstein-level research abilities" to "compensate for having fewer people overall."

Malcolm said he was glad to see Musk bring these issues to the forefront. "He's not as afraid of being canceled as everyone else," Malcolm told me. "Any smart person with a certain cultural aesthetics of their life is looking at this world and saying, 'How do we create intergenerationally, durable cultures that will lead to our species being a diverse, thriving, innovative interplanetary empire one day that isn't at risk from, you know, a single asteroid strike or a single huge disease?'"

Sitting around the breakfast table after the 6 a.m. day-care drop-off and "morning strategy walk" the Collinses take every day, Malcolm read aloud a text message from his mother. She wanted to know how he and Simone planned to monetize their pronatalism "hobby." "Remember: Everything is transactional," she texted.

Born into a storied and monied family in Dallas, Malcolm said his ancestors included prominent members of the jayhawkers, antislavery activists who rebelled against the Confederate Army. Following his parents' divorce, Malcolm was shipped off to a "troubled teen" facility, an experience he compares to that depicted in the movie "Holes," in which children are sent to work at labor camps in the desert. Malcolm says his father managed to squander the family fortune throughout his five marriages. "He at one point had bought the most expensive thing at Christies," Malcolm said. "He has nothing now. No money."

Simone, meanwhile, came from polyamorous, tai-chi-practicing, hippie parents in Alameda, California. "I was kind of the black sheep of the family," she said. "Like, they would tell me to go out and drink and experiment, but I would rebel by staying home and doing my homework."

Before she met Malcolm, Simone was convinced she wanted to live her life single and child-free. But when she was 24, she decided to have her heart broken once just to say she'd done it. As she does with all her goals, she created a system: She made a profile on OKCupid, where a picture of her dressed as a Stormtrooper in a sultry pose was catnip for the nerds of Silicon Valley, and rated her dates out of 50. After a string of 16s, Malcolm scored a 42. She made him promise to break up with her after four months. "I resent being in love with him," she said. "I was so disturbed when I fell for him."

A year and a half later, Malcolm proposed to her via a viral campaign that landed on the front page of Reddit. Once they were married, Simone got a master's in technology policy at Cambridge, eager to keep pace with her husband's Stanford MBA.

During a stint at a venture-capital fund in South Korea, where the fertility rate has fallen to about 0.81, Malcolm became obsessed with the idea of what he calls "demographic catastrophe."

He was astounded by people's fatalistic take on it," Simone said. So, following up on a conversation Malcolm had broached on their second date, the couple committed to having seven to 13 children. Because of their relatively late start and Simone's preexisting fertility issues, they knew they would have to freeze their embryos for later use. In 2018, which they now call "The Year of the Harvest," they devoted themselves to producing and freezing as many viable embryos as possible.

After five rounds of IVF, Simone heard Stephen Hsu talking about his company Genomic Prediction on a podcast. Preimplantation testing for chromosomal abnormalities like down syndrome and single-gene disorders like cystic fibrosis has become a relatively common step in the IVF process, but only recently have some practitioners begun to offer tests for more complex genetic traits. While full-blown genetic engineering through CRISPR or similar technology is banned in most countries, the field of preimplantation genetic screening is still unregulated by the US Food and Drug Administration.

The Collinses decided to embark on a sixth round of IVF to use the service. Though Genomic Prediction's "LifeView" test officially offers risk scores only for 11 polygenic disorders — including schizophrenia and five types of cancer — they allowed the Collinses to access the raw genetic data for their own analysis.

Simone and Malcolm then took their data export to a company called SelfDecode, which typically runs tests on adult DNA samples, to analyze what the Collinses called "the fun stuff."

Sitting on the couch, Simone pulled up a spreadsheet filled with red and green numbers. Each row represented one of their embryos from the sixth batch, and the columns a variety of relative risk factors, from obesity to heart disease to headaches. (The "relative" part means these scores can only compare each embryo's risk to that of other individuals with different genetic constitutions, as opposed to "absolute" risk scores.)

The Collinses' top priority was one of the most disputed categories: what they called "mental-performance-adjacent traits," including stress, chronically low mood, brain fog, mood swings, fatigue, anxiety, and ADHD.

The tests they performed also provided a risk score for autism, a diagnosis Simone herself has received, which they decided not to take into account. Simone compared her autism to a "fine-tuned race car": Even if she struggles with certain "real-world" situations, she said, "If I'm on the track and I have my pit crew and I have the perfect fuel—"

"—she can dramatically outcompete other people," Malcolm said, finishing her sentence.

"I'm also really hesitant to select against any type of extreme mental peculiarity in a person," he added. "Unless it has to do just with severe low function."

With a large number of green columns and a score of 1.9, Embryo No. 3 — aka Titan Invictus (an experiment in nominative determinism) — was selected to become the Collinses' third child.

Even with all that planning, the Collinses may not be striking genetic gold. The field of behavioral genetics, which assumes a connection between genes and character traits, is heavily contested — if not outright rejected for its dangerous societal implications. "It's not clear how much genetics contributes to many of the things that they're looking for," Hank Greely, a Stanford Law professor who wrote "The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction," told me.

Arguments that trace mental aptitude back to genetics are particularly controversial. Hsu, the Genomic Prediction cofounder, was forced to resign from his position at Michigan State University after the graduate-student union claimed Hsu believed "in innate biological differences between human populations, especially regarding intelligence." (Hsu responded to these allegations by saying: "If the GEU made the claim in your quote, they misrepresented my beliefs. I am quite explicit in my writing and in interviews that we do not know whether there are genetic group differences in intelligence between different ancestry groups.") Simone said two PGT-P startups planning to test for the "fun stuff" were fundraising in stealth mode because "they anticipate being essentially canceled as soon as they go public."

The Collinses themselves have been called "hipster eugenicists" online, something Simone called "amazing" when I brought it to her attention.

Malcolm's "going to want to make business cards that say 'Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists," she said with a laugh.

"It's funny that people are so afraid of being accused of Nazism," when they're just improving their own embryos, Simone added, after noting that her Jewish grandmother escaped Nazi-occupied France. "I'm not eliminating people. I mean, I'm eliminating from my own genetic pool, but these are all only Malcolm and me."

[The Brain]

Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents' calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.

People have named their kids Optimus Prime for decades. BFD.

[Tamas]

"Any smart person with a certain cultural aesthetics of their life is looking at this world and saying, 'How do we create intergenerationally, durable cultures that will lead to our species being a diverse, thriving, innovative interplanetary empire one day that isn't at risk from, you know, a single asteroid strike or a single huge disease?'"

[HVC]

Why do eugenics nuts always assume smart people have smart kids.

[Richard Hakluyt]

What kind of genius names their first kid Octavian    ?

[Syt]

What kind of genius names their first kid Octavian    ?

The kind of genius who names their daughter Titan Invictus instead of, say, Titania Invicta?

[The Brain]

Why did Torsten get a normal name?

[Admiral Yi]

Why did Torsten get a normal name?

 

[Syt]

Why did Torsten get a normal name?

Yeah, that confused me, too, having known and met plenty Torstens in my life. Though I guess for USians it might be "exotic"? Kinda like "Britta" on Community.

[The Larch]

One thing is having kids, a very different one is actually raising them.

[The Brain]

Is Elmo donating sperm on a large scale btw? If he's serious about spreading his genes then natural methods aren't exactly geniusy.