In November 2025, Tesla shareholders approved a pay package for Elon Musk worth up to a trillion dollars, and one of its operational milestones is the delivery of a million robots. In January 2026, Musk promoted those robots at Davos, promising that they would care for the elderly where human workers are in short supply.

On October 26, on his own platform, X, he warned that because of low birth rates entire countries and cultures will go extinct forever.

Musk is more than a visionary of a coming demographic catastrophe. The richest man in the world is the chief beneficiary of the modern global financial system. That system concentrates wealth in the hands of a few and leaves everyone else to face debt, expensive housing, expensive health care and relentless work on their own.

Musk is not the one pushing society toward loneliness, the breakdown of social ties and falling birth rates. But he is the one who has learned to make money from it.

Fear as a Business

On October 26, Musk shared a post by @IterIntellectus on X, the platform he controls, formerly known as Twitter. The post showed a chart in which, at 1.14 children per woman, the current rate in Italy and Japan, each new generation shrinks by almost half, and after three generations only one-sixth as many people are born as today[1]. Musk added the comment “It means entire countries and cultures will go extinct forever.” The author of the chart noted in small print that it was a scenario, not a population projection.

The figures behind the chart match official statistics. Italy registered 355,000 births in 2025 at a fertility rate of 1.14[2]. Japan registered about 671,000 births among Japanese nationals in Japan at the same rate, the lowest since records began[3]. The problem is real, but the word “forever” was added by Musk, and it turns conditional figures into a verdict.

Musk’s warnings about the death of whole nations are not new. In May 2022, he wrote that unless the birth rate came to exceed the death rate, “Japan will eventually cease to exist”[4]. On the Full Send podcast the same year, he predicted that civilization would quietly die in adult diapers[5]. In December 2023, at a festival of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party in Rome, he said he did not want Japan and Italy to disappear as cultures[6]. The October post with the chart fits the same pattern.

The eschatological “forever” was posted on X, which since October 2024 has paid creators according to how much premium subscribers engage with their posts and directs up to a quarter of subscription revenue to these payouts[7].

Posts using emotional language spread further, and this has been measured. A team of New York University psychologists led by William Brady analyzed more than 560,000 tweets on gun control, same-sex marriage and climate change and found in 2017 that each additional moral-emotional word was associated with about 20% more retweets[8]. Four years later, Cambridge and New York University researchers analyzed 2.7 million political posts by US media outlets and members of Congress on Twitter and Facebook. Each negative word was associated with a 14% increase in the odds of a post being shared[9]. These studies measure associations; they do not establish causation or the revenue generated by specific Musk posts. But X’s payout model itself turns attention and engagement, including engagement driven by fear, into a commercial resource.

“The Path to Abundance for All”

Musk turned the fear of humanity’s disappearance into hype for a new product. At Davos on January 22, in a conversation with BlackRock chief Larry Fink, he said that “with robotics and AI, this is really the path to abundance for all,” that robots would outnumber humans, and that the elderly who have no one to care for them would be taken into the embrace of humanoid machines[10][11].

The pay package is split into 12 tranches, each granting Musk about 35 million Tesla shares, and for each one the company must meet two conditions[12]. Its market value must reach a set level, from $2 trillion to $8.5 trillion, and the company must hit one of its operational milestones, among them 20 million vehicles sold, 10 million self-driving subscriptions, a million robotaxis, a million robots delivered and annual adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $50 billion to $400 billion[13]. Robots are only one of the milestones. But investors also hear the story of elderly people with no one to care for them, and their valuation sets Tesla’s market value and with it every tranche of the award.

How robots connect to Musk’s award

12 tranches

About 35 million shares in each tranche.

$2–8.5 trillion

Tesla’s market-capitalization milestone range.

1 million robots

One operational milestone; not a requirement for every tranche.

20 million vehicles

Another alternative operational milestone for Tesla.

Musk wants to sell robots as a replacement for people who are disappearing, and to those who have no human relationships, his artificial intelligence company, xAI, sells an imitation of them. In July 2025, it released virtual “companions” for the Grok chatbot, with access initially priced at $30 a month. Among the companions is Ani, an anime girl who greets the user by calling him babe. The relationship with her is structured like a game with levels. The longer a person talks to her, the more explicit she becomes, and at the third level adult content unlocks[14].

A robot caregiver is not harmful in itself. But an eroticized subscription girlfriend takes the place of a family, a robot the place of grandchildren, a feed the place of conversation. The owners of global platforms and corporations profit from every substitution.

Children Families Can’t Afford

Musk holds himself up as an example and says he has already done his part for the birth rate, with 14 children[15]. In September, Forbes put his fortune at $908 billion[16]. Musk is exceptional twice over, as the father of 14 children and as the richest man on the planet, and the two exceptions go together. His readers live in an entirely different world.

In the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) survey covering purchases between July 2024 and June 2025, the median age of first-time US homebuyers reached 40; in the 1980s it was below 30[17]. Until a family owns its home, it rents, and rents in the United States rose by about 149% between 1990 and 2020 against overall inflation of 103%. Benjamin Couillard, an economics doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, estimated in his model that rising housing costs after 1990 led to about 11% fewer children in the United States than in the counterfactual without that increase, a gap described in reporting on the study as roughly 13 million births[18]. This is a model-based estimate, not a direct count of births that did not happen. Housing is only one of the costs a family carries alone. A family that rents is in no position to follow Musk’s example.

The desire to have children has not disappeared. UNFPA, together with YouGov, surveyed adults in 14 countries and reported in 2025 that almost one in five reproductive-age adults does not expect to have the number of children they want. In a separate question to about 10,000 respondents who already had or wanted children, 39% cited financial limitations, 21% unemployment or job insecurity, 19% housing concerns and 12% lack of affordable childcare[19]. These are distinct barriers and respondents could select several; the percentages do not refer only to the one-fifth who expect to fall short of their plans. The report does not explain the entire global decline in fertility, but it shows that money, work and housing stand between wanting children and having them.

Barriers to having the desired number of children

39% · Finances

Financial limitations.

21% · Work

Unemployment or job insecurity.

19% · Housing

Housing costs or lack of space.

12% · Childcare

Lack of affordable childcare.

The No-Exit Ecosystem

In the modern financial system, wealth flows to the few. According to the Federal Reserve, in the second quarter of 2026 the wealthiest 1% of American households held 32.5% of all household wealth and the bottom half held 2.3%[20]. The three largest asset managers, Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street, manage the savings of hundreds of millions of people and hold stakes in most of the largest American companies. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam calculated in 2017 that together the three were the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P 500 companies[21]. In most industries the market has been divided among a handful of corporations, and their executives and lobbyists move into senior government posts and back. French President Emmanuel Macron worked from 2008 as an investment banker at Rothschild & Co[22], and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz previously chaired the supervisory board of BlackRock’s German arm from 2016[23]. American households owed $18 trillion at the end of 2024 in mortgages, student loans, car loans and credit card balances, and almost all of it carries interest[24]. A student with $100,000 in debt enters the labor market under pressure that discourages risk-taking, and a child means another 20 years of expenses.

At the same time, the ties and organizations that once defended people’s rights and helped them in hard times are coming apart. Union membership among US wage and salary workers fell from more than 34% in 1954[25] to 10% in 2025[26], platform workers share neither a workplace nor working hours, and social atomization is growing. Sociologist Robert Putnam described in 2000 how voluntary associations in the United States were dissolving, and with them the circle of neighbors and acquaintances who stood by a person in trouble[27]. The breakdown of these ties serves the system itself. A union can win wages on which children can be raised, and a cooperative or a community can provide housing and credit without a bank. Alone, all of this is far harder to achieve. The system whose oracle is Musk destroys the solidarity of the groups capable of changing it, and so it meets no resistance[28].

Musk’s role in this ecosystem is clear from his record at Tesla and Twitter and in the Trump administration.

More Than an Observer

Musk’s link to the ecosystem is visible in the list of Tesla’s largest shareholders. As of September 2025, Vanguard held 7.6% of its shares, BlackRock 6.2% and State Street 3.4%, about 17% together, more than Musk’s own stake of roughly 15%[29]. These are the same three asset managers named above; they hold shares predominantly through funds on behalf of clients. When Tesla’s value rises, Musk grows richer, and these firms see their assets grow and with them the fees they charge clients.

As an employer, Musk takes from workers the very time they need for their families. In November 2022, after buying Twitter, he sent staff an email demanding they work “extremely hardcore,” meaning long hours at high intensity, and gave them a day and a half to sign on or leave[30].

In government, he struck at the agency that protects the same borrowers whose debts were described above. From January to May 2025, Musk served in the Trump administration as a special government employee and was the driving force behind the Department of Government Efficiency, created to cut federal spending[31]. On February 7, 2025, when his team gained access to the systems of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Musk posted “CFPB RIP” on X. The bureau supervises banks and lenders and since its creation after the 2008 crisis has returned more than $17 billion to people harmed by financial companies[32]. It also oversees auto lending and was due to oversee the payment system X was launching with Visa. On February 19, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff demanded the removal of Musk’s team from the bureau, writing that he was neutralizing the agency that would supervise X’s wallet and warning that his team’s actions also stood to benefit Tesla[33].

Musk the businessman and his companies live off public money like a family of fourteen. By the count of The Washington Post, his companies received $38 billion from federal and local governments over two decades in contracts, loans, subsidies and tax breaks. SpaceX received at least a billion dollars a year from 2016, Tesla more than a billion a year from 2020, and in 2024 the total reached a record of at least $6.3 billion[34]. The government whose spending Musk was cutting in 2025 had paid his companies more than ever the year before.

Nature Does Not Pass Sentence

Musk’s “forever” sounds as if nature were passing sentence. In fact, it is the no-exit ecosystem that passes sentence. One of its chief beneficiaries scares people with talk of extinction, yet demanded “hardcore” work from his employees and greeted his team’s takeover of the bureau that protected borrowers with “RIP.” He takes time and protection away from people and profits from it. A society bound by solidarity, one that does not live in fear and cares for its own, hurts Musk’s business. It threatens his trillion.

Sources

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