Silicon Valley elites are quietly appointing themselves ancestors of the future.
As American fertility rates continue to hit record lows — well below the “replacement rate” from one generation to the next — the pronatalism movement has found a foothold in the tech world.
Elon Musk — who apparently now has 13 children — has openly endorsed the movement, which believes in pumping out babies to fight societal collapse. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said, “Of course I’m going to have a big family” and is investing in experimental fertility technology.
According to Malcolm Collins, an outspoken proponent of pronatalism, even more moguls are quietly expressing their support behind the closed doors of private conferences and investor meetings.
Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz alum Balaji Srinivasan is one of the tech titans who will speak at March’s NatalCon in Austin, where tickets go for $1,000 each.
“The people who are willing to make the sacrifices and engage with [the movement] seriously are going to be the people who write the future of humanity,” Collins, a Stanford-educated former venture capitalist, told The Post.
He estimates at least half of pronatalists are in the tech world.
Collins, 38, and his wife Simone, 37, are the parents to four children under five and plan to have as many kids as nature will allow to save mankind. They believe that collapsing birth rates foretell economic stagnation, a strain on social services and overall cultural deterioration — and that futuristic fertility tech is the path to salvation.
They’ve dedicated their lives to ringing the alarm bells on population collapse with their “Based Camp” podcast, five co-authored books and The Pragmatist Foundation, which they co-founded as a resource for information about surrogacy, reproductive technology and childcare.
The couple met in 2012 in San Francisco while Malcolm was pursuing his Stanford MBA. Simone, who holds a master’s degree in technology policy from Cambridge, said she never wanted a family.
“I, having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, obviously never wanted to have kids, but instead wanted to start a company and live alone forever,” explained Simone, who talked to The Post while walking on a treadmill with a baby on her back.
Her outlook changed when Malcolm took a stint working at a VC firm in South Korea, where, he explained, the economy was “a house of cards about to collapse.”
South Korea declared population decline a national emergency last year, as it’s projected there will be only 4 grandchildren for every 100 Koreans alive today. President Yoon Suk Yeol has offered extended parental leave and provided housing stipends to families with newborns.
Meanwhile, in Japan, an aging populace is straining social benefits and elder care infrastructure. The number of senior citizens has quadrupled since the ’70s, while the proportion of children was cut in half.
Malcolm became worried that the West was not long behind: At 1.6 births per woman, the US is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman required to keep the population level.
After failed attempts to conceive naturally, the Collinses drained their savings on IVF in 2017.
“It’s so heartbreakingly expensive to create embryos that we lived on a mattress on the floor of a studio,” Malcolm recalled. “People say, ‘I don’t have the money to have kids.’ What they really mean is, ‘I don’t want to sacrifice my quality of life.’”
Simone’s no-kids POV has shifted dramatically. “Putting short-term comforts, like more trips, more vacations, a nicer place to live, nicer food, over the prospect of bringing a human life into the world with their full range of experiences is just ridiculous,” she said.
The couple, who lives in rural Valley Forge, Penn., originally planned on five to seven kids, but now they want a “significantly larger” family to join Octavian George, 5; Torsten Savage, 3; Titan Invictus, 2; and Industry Americus, 1.
“[Kids] get much easier when you get into higher numbers,” Malcolm said. “You can begin to industrialize the child-rearing process… It’s like a factory farm of kids.”
All of their children wear the exact same clothing, organized in baskets based on age. The gifts under the family’s Christmas tree are hand-me-downs from older siblings.
“Everyone [else] is doing parenting on hard mode with one or two kids,” Malcom said.
George Mason University economics professor Robin Hanson agrees population collapse is a looming emergency and warns that fertility decline could upend the economy and cause innovation to slow.
“Innovation is the central part of the modern economy, where every generation has more wealth and more technology,” he told The Post. “It’s a pretty dramatic idea that subsequent lives wouldn’t be substantially better than previous ones.”
That’s a concern that seems to particularly resonate with innovators like Musk, who tweeted in 2022 that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
He has also shared footage of NatalCon, the annual pronatalist conference, to his hundreds of millions of X followers.
Malcolm and Simone Collins are expected to speak at NatalCon 2025 in March, alongside Srinivasan, academics, and influencers like Raw Egg Nationalist.
Conference founder Kevin Dolan told The Post he takes great care to balance the gender of speakers but notes that four of his female presenters dropped out last year to give birth.
It’s even become a bit of a singles scene, Dolan said, with aspirational parents coupling up. Lillian, the former 22-year-old director of The Pragmatist Foundation, attended last year but didn’t find a partner.
“The natural female intuition is to want children,” Lillian, who asked to withhold her last name for privacy reasons, told The Post. “I’m only unusual in that I’ve pulled out of a pathological modern environment that artificially suppresses women’s desire to have lots of children.”
A self-described nomad bouncing between Boston, Austin, San Francisco and Washington, DC, she discovered the pronatalist movement online while studying education at Harvard.
“If people don’t even think that having children is a good thing to begin with, I think that’s a very, very bad sign for the state of American culture,” Lillian said.
Barely half of young people aged 18 to 34 plan to have children, and 35% of those who don’t cite climate change as their reason. “The doomerism is quite bad,” Lillian lamented.
As the pronatalist movement grows, the Collinses have become lightning rods of controversy. The couple was criticized online after Malcolm reportedly slapped their 2-year-old son during an interview with the Guardian in May.
He later defended himself, saying, “We lightly “bop” the kids to reorient them and show a boundary has been crossed.”
Their movement has also been accused of flirting with eugenics. Simone and Malcolm implanted their fifth child via IVF in January, after selecting the embryo by sending DNA to several startups including the Altman-funded Genomic Prediction, that screen for predisposition to diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer — which runs in Simone’s family — as well as mental health conditions like schizophrenia and depression.
“I love it when people come to me, and they’re like, ‘You’re genociding depressed people,’” Malcolm said. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a depressed person who was like, ‘I want more people to have depression, like this is an awesome thing.’”
They also purchased information about their children’s predisposition to traits like brain fog, ability to deal with stress and intelligence.
“People find that very spicy,” Malcolm said. “They ask, ‘Why would you pay to make your kids smarter?’ And I’m like, ‘Why do you pay for your kid to go to SAT prep?’”
Fertility is becoming a pet project in Silicon Valley. Some $874 million was invested in fertility-related startups in 2023 alone.
Alife, an IVF tool that uses artificial intelligence to select embryos for implantation, raised $22 million. Meanwhile, EctoLife plans to gestate babies using artificial wombs. An AI-generated promotional video depicts hundreds of babies growing in capsules in a warehouse.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, invested in Conception, a startup working to make egg cells out of other cells in the body, meaning that a woman without viable eggs or even two men could make a baby.
Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, a father of six, even donated almost half a million dollars to the Collinses’ charity through a donor-advised fund.
“[Pronatalism] requires you to look at the data and break from social norms, which is what Silicon Valley people love doing more than anything else,” Malcolm explained. “You almost couldn’t have anything better created for them. They get to say something that’s true by the data but also shocks other people in the room.”
The Collinses are so dedicated to their technology-forward vision that it’s become a religion to them — literally.
The couple expound Techno-Puritanism, a faith they invented and officially registered with the IRS this year. A secular, Judeo-Christian denomination that also draws on Muslim, Mormon, and Zoroastrian traditions, Techno-Puritanism has “at its core … a mandate for intergenerational improvement.”
They have also made a promise to dedicated followers — many of them childless, male techno-optimists: name the Pragmatist Foundation as a beneficiary in your will, and your genes will be preserved for posterity.
“We will take a full genome sequence of you … and put it in the founding formation of whatever we end up creating as a society,” Malcolm said in a recent podcast episode. “If we’re successful, maybe one day in the near future, people will be using that, either to create humans or to create people in AI environments.”
And they’re already orchestrating the next generation of pronatalists by creating an “index” of pronatalist families who want their children to date and procreate with each other.
Their movement might still be small, but Malcolm believes he and Simone could be the techno Adam and Eve.
“If Simone and I had eight kids, and we built an intergenerational culture… for just eleven generations,” he said, “we would have more descendants than there are humans on Earth today.”
