Name: Babies.
Age: Young.
Appearance: Cute and disgusting, by turns.
Sounds pretty unappealing. What do you do with one? Not much at first.
Really? I always understood them to be fairly high-maintenance. Not if you’re Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and father of a baby boy.
The kid with the unusual name that he had with the singer Grimes? That’s right, little X Æ A-xii.
How do you pronounce that? Just like it’s spelled: X Ash A-Twelve.
So Musk isn’t a hands-on parent? Apparently not. “Babies are just eating and pooping machines, you know?” he told the New York Times. “Right now, there’s not much I can do.”
Apart from feeding him and changing him, you mean. It sounds as if Grimes takes care of all that. “Grimes has a much bigger role than me right now,” said Musk. “When the kid gets older, there will be more of a role for me.”
Maybe he’s not that keen on kids. He has five other children with his ex-wife, and he takes them on business trips with him.
Then it’s just babies he’s not crazy about. Oh no, he loves them. “I think babies are super-cool and really people need to have more babies because, it sounds obvious, but if people don’t have enough babies, humanity will disappear.”
No, it won’t. It could. We’re in the middle of a global crash in fertility figures, for which scientists say we are woefully unprepared.
Seriously? How bad is it? The fertility rate – the number of children the average woman has in a lifetime – was 2.4 in 2017, down from 4.7 in the 1950s.
That sounds like a good thing to me. But it’s still falling. If it gets below 2.1, the global population will begin to decrease. Studies project that it will drop to 1.7 in the coming decades. After peaking at 9.7bn, the world’s population will fall back to 8.8bn by the end of the century.
Why is that something to worry about? We’ll have a lot more old people than young people, which is economically unviable. And some countries will be hit harder than others. Japan, for example, could see its population halve. The fertility rate across England and Wales for women under 30 dropped to 1.65 in 2019 – a record low.
So, annoyingly, Musk is doing us a giant favour. As is Boris Johnson, to a much less determinable extent.
Do say: “Procreation? It’s the least I can do.”
Don’t say: “Give away a free Tesla with each one, and I’ll think about it.”