Asked last week if this philosophy had informed his own family size, Musk agreed that, just like our own Rees-Mogg, who reportedly hopes for a seventh, he strives, insemination-wise, to set an example. Although parents tend to say they’d have liked more children, “studies also suggest childbearing has a limited effect on parental happiness and life satisfaction”.Īt least, it’s been noted of Musk, the car magnate has followed his own reproductive advice. The Social Market Foundation wondered, in a recent assessment of the UK’s “ baby shortage”, if bigger families would even add to parental contentment. Birthrate-boosting programmes conflict with those for educating girls: the more educated women are, the fewer children they have. What’s less certain is that this spells disaster or, if it does, that there is anything, short of building a new Gilead, that pronatalists from Musk to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, can do about it. ![]() The numbers indeed show that, as in the UK, US fertility rates, already below replacement level, declined still further in 2020, by 4%. The company delayed the rollout of the change to verification until after the US midterm elections.But now Musk announces, in language only marginally more temperate, that the scariest thing is the opposite: “Please look at the numbers – if people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble. Now the charge has been dropped to $8 a month, with select verified accounts set to have “official” noted on their profiles. Musk had initially planned to charge $20 a month for applying a blue tick to user accounts, in a shake-up of the verification system. In the chaotic days since then, there have been reports that the company sought to re-hire some employees after realising their roles were needed to keep the site running, or to implement some of Musk’s proposed changes to the platform. A consortium of banks also loaned $13bn to finance the deal.Īfter completing the takeover, Musk fired the CEO and several top executives, before laying off up to half of the company’s workforce. Musk had committed to financing the takeover himself, but went on to receive support in the form of $7bn from investors including Larry Ellison, founder of the Oracle software group, and the cryptocurrency platform Binance. Musk admitted at the time of the results that he was “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now”. Tesla’s value has dropped about 46% this year, but Musk’s net-worth remains just under $200bn. The sale came just weeks after Tesla reported $3.3bn in profit and $21.45bn in revenue for the third quarter – falling short of Wall Street expectations – which caused a 4% drop on the day. Musk, who is the world’s richest man, now holds around 135 million Tesla shares. “In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close *and* some equity partners don’t come through, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock,” he tweeted.
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