The silicon valley pronatalist stance is because they want to be patriarchs in full control of their family. They want absolute control over women and absolute control over their kids. Or they want to exert control over particular minority groups.
Thank goodness you didn't assume what they mean as well, then.
If someone calls themselves a free speech maximalist followed by banning people who criticize him, then he cannot by definition be a free speech maximalist.
Also, according to the article, Musk "called children and called declining birth rates a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming," which is not so much pro-natalism as it is dismissive of global warming, because Musk no longer cares about electric cars and has pivoted to ventures that are much less friendly to the environment such as AI and mass rocket launches.
And cited his opposition to apartheid as the central reason that he left the country as soon as he could, at age 17, because he didn't want to be a part of that system.
There are so many legitimate reasons to criticize Musk, but this isn't one.
You didn't mention how "opposition to apartheid" also meant avoiding mandatory military service. Interesting coincidence, I would say. Serious question: if one cared about ending Apartheid, wouldn't it be much more effective to do that from within South Africa than from across the ocean?
See also: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
There are tons of (valid) reasons for and against boosting birthrates, but you have to break it down to the actual reasons that people are "natalists" or not.
Throwing all (anti-)"natalists" into the same pot makes as much sense as labelling communists, fascists and anarchists "anti-capitalists" instead; yes your label technically applies, but the group it describes is so heterogenous that you can't meaningfully talk about it anyway.
I am not sure what % of pro-natalists that applies to, exactly, but keep in mind most people in Silicon Valley voted for Clinton/Biden/Harris in 2016, 2020, and 2024 and most are not weird traditionalist cultural conservatives. There are many progressive left-liberal pro-natalists who just 1) don't want humanity to go extinct and 2) know that population decline in a country can lead to various issues, including economic problems. Immigration can help with some of that, but reproduction rate is declining or low in basically every single country and so immigration will eventually also not be a sustainable solution.
I think the majority of vocal pro-natalists are probably right-wing/racist/misogynistic, but the core pro-natalist stance in itself (as opposed to a stance of "whites are being out-reproduced", or something) is, in general, still a completely reasonable and I'd argue moral position.
-- W. B. Yeats
Yes, work from home is beneficial for employees, but what's best for their employees is not what they're interested in.
It looks like "pronatalist" policy is "say you support increased birth rates while simultaneously being against any economic policy that would support families."
Which looks like the conservative playbook for decades. "Yes, more people in need, with limited education, so we can scare them into supporting more of the same."
Do I have that right? Or did I miss some nuance?
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2024/1218/elon-musk-cu...
"...they went on to become the faces of the pronatalist movement, and so far they’ve been given several long profiles for mainstream media outlets to share their pronatalist ideals. This week, it was the Telegraph. In January, it was the New York Post. Last year, it was Business Insider. As Business Insider put it, pronatalism—espoused by Elon Musk, for example—is about breeding supposedly “genetically superior” people. The Collinses have expressed in multiple profiles that certain traits like empathy and even political beliefs are genetically inherited, and so breeding among people who hold those beliefs will carry them forward. In an email to Motherboard, the Collinses disputed this characterization and described pronatalism as “a movement that urges individuals from low fertility cultures to have kids to preserve as much genetic and cultural diversity as possible.”
TFA? It certainly is.
The term pronatalist? Maybe it shouldn't be, but TFA is a political commentary on the term.
I'm just trying to understand how this word is being used. And all the answers thus far indicate that it does indeed encompass political beliefs.
Vogue did a decent overview of this[1] and history is littered with all kinds of examples if you go looking.
1. https://www.vogue.com/article/dark-history-of-the-far-rights...
It's just that those people tend to be about 2 standard deviations out on whatever normal distribution you're dealing with.
Here in the US, you get a lot of these incel-y types with women control and breeding kinks.
But in China, it's more the very hardcore commies worried about the future of the party in 30 years and maybe have one chubby grandchild.
In Korea and Japan, you get a lot of Moonie types and that sort of folk.
In the Middle East (huge, I know), these are the hardcore Muslim folks but with a family bent (think strange uncles without children themselves).
South Americans here will be the turbo Catholic variety typically with a lot of kids already
Generally, the person that is in the pro-natalist camp is generally a person that is conservative in their social ideas. They want yesterday to be like to day, and today to be like tomorrow.
But, their individual ideologies and day-to-day-life are about as opposed to each other as can be and they may outright hate each other.
Marx would have a field day with these people.
> ...
> The loudest “pronatalists” (Musk, Andreessen) spent two years killing workplace flexibility while funding nearly a billion in elite fertility tech.
So the message here is SV pronatalists aren't actually pronatalists, because pronatalism is way down on their list of priorities, especially bar below the priority of "be an imperious boss."
Capitalism seems to like to choke everything that's not maximum capitalism, reproduction in this case. It has no future unless humanity can be replaced by capitalist machines, but fortunately we've got top men working on that.
Imagine this for a sci-fi story: a dead world, its dominant technological species extinct, but it's mindless LLM-powered machines live on, mining raw materials and trading on a stock market.
Or it's genuine, but almost completely trumped by other concerns, which I think is the more psychologically plausible explanation than conscious deception. They only pursue pronatalism without contracting their other priorities, which makes their actions ineffective.
Or their belief is twisted: they're pronatalists, but not pro your natalism (e.g. they're really only interested in a master-race of SV founders reproducing).
Pronatalists didn't kill WFH - offshoring did.
I've mentioned my experiences in board meetings about this topic as well [0].
WFH proved to the leadership of a number of previously hesitant companies that async and distributed work doesn't impact delivery.
But wait, why should I even keep paying a Silicon Valley salary for someone living in Tulsa, when I can have my existing Eastern European or Indian employees move back to the old country and open a GCC hub for me?
Most of the CEE along with Western European countries like Netherlands and Ireland have ass-in-seat requirements for American companies to unlock FDI subsidizes when opening a GCC. Additionally, management culture in London as well as Paris is very hybrid work oriented.
There is a decent proliferation of WFH roles in Europe, but those are the same roles in the US anyhow - we're posting those in Europe it's us offshoring.
Germans need to stop using "Europe" as a stand-in for Germany.
I live in Spain, and received WFH job offers from Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish and German companies. For all intents and purposes, WFH doesn't seem "dead" in Europe at all, as far as I can tell.
> like Netherlands has ass-in-seat requirements for American companies
That might be true, but doesn't really tell us about Dutch companies, just what American companies want/does in Europe, doesn't really reflect what European companies are up to.
Most tech employment in Europe is via American FDI.
And for a large number of "European" companies it's the same management, board members, and investors as in the US. Heck, I'm on the board of a European company as well.
Coming from the person who said "Germans need to stop using "Europe" as a stand-in for Germany"... I don't think whatever you personally experienced applies to all of Europe, it's not a tiny place with heterogeneous employment situations across the continent exactly.
It got better with COVID, but you still have to dig, to find something 100% remote.
GCC = global capability center
But the article framing as if the pronatalists somehow knew of the birth rate benefit and maliciously used it to counter their stated goals is too heavy-handed.
How about framing this as the new information that it is and getting the information out there in a positive way so that it can be used in both government and corporate policy?
It's good to have exact numbers of course, but I can't see how anyone would think RTO wouldn't impact fertility or households in some fashion.
By the end of the pandemic, it was more of a social battle between those who wanted to maintain the new normal and those who absolutely loathed it, and again nobody* really cared about childcare.
Closest anyone got to caring about childcare at any point was home-schooling and the value of air filters in classrooms.
* I am of course being excessively absolutist with this language, very little is all-or-none.
Like the saying goes: lemons -> lemonade
Also, garbage article. Sounds like bait/generated.
They want cheaper gas but they want to halt electric car sales.
They want more babies but oppose maternity/paternity leave and work from home.
They want fewer unwed teen pregnancies but oppose comprehensive sex education.
They want religion to be more popular but continually protect and associate with priests and pastors that are sexual predators.
They want more people to own guns but freak TF out when their darlings get assassinated (by gunfire).
They want less fraud in government programs but spend vastly more than ever gets lost to fraud trying to catch it.
They want a better economy but oppose nearly every measure that would improve it such as a higher minimum wage, affordable housing programs, socialized medicine, etc.
That is an interesting point, and not obvious why it would be so. In fact, it kind of calls into question whether the whole relationship is causal. The people who were able to WFH longer were more often in high-income jobs (service workers never got to do it in the first place, it was almost entirely an office worker thing). They were thus more likely to be in an economic position where they felt comfortable having another child.
This would also explain why it impacted the intensive margin (children per mother) but not the extensive margin (percent women who are mothers).
I don't have a problem with WFH where it makes sense, and I do think many societies need to look at how to help young adults become parents, but I am a bit skeptical of this particular relation. If you've ever been a parent with a young child at home, your estimate of how much work you could do would be possible is a lot more modest.
Ask me how I know it...
When the kid is sick and not in school daycare, that one person can do supervision. A sick kid usually does not need super involved care whole day, but they cant be left alone whole day either.
Believe Switzerland allows professionals to choose the percentage of work time they want to sign up for. For instance, if 100% is 8h, 5d/week, 80% would be 4d/week. The parent can then both take 80% each & have 2 work days free for childcare.
But housing, transportation, daycare costs make that impractical. If they really want me in the office, companies need to engage on these issues in the metros they live in. They need to clear NIMBY barriers to urban housing, support transit, and good parental leave.
I live ~20 minutes away from my job and you eventually get tired of that, too. Car maintenance, bad weather, bad drivers, etc. grind you down little by little everyday.
Sometimes I just want to be at home to do deep thinking without anyone bothering me.
Sometimes the weather makes it so I don't leave the house.
Just let me decide where I work from.
But what if they can't? The options aren't great:
1. One of them takes a hit on their career for the benefit of the other.
2. Both move to an area with OK-ish jobs for both, sharing the sacrifice.
3. Both take optimal jobs wherever they are and move into a long distance relationship.
With kids in the mix, it becomes even harder, you might want to be around family to have a support network etc.
RTO mandates generally seem pretty tone deaf about this aspect.
Regressive attitudes tend to not come alone.
Hiring by catchment area does seem very appealing for anyone - neither the companies nor the candidates.
It's rent, the answer is almost always rent. Its my rent, its my child-care workers rent, it my kids school-teachers rent. It's always rent.
My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.
Additionally, I wonder how many CxOs have corporate real estate in their investment portfolio which might influence decisions.
You don’t spend many billions on the offices for nothing.
I imagine there was some pressure from cities as well since many downtown businesses rely on foot traffic.
Are the tech firms the ones spending billions on office buildings? It's certainly not the VPs.
What pressure are cities applying to companies to get them to move back into the offices, exactly?
After all, not a single CEO cited published metrics for the productivity reasons for ending WFH, and almost all went about other power grab type moves later to show the working class the power they were able to wield during COVID was over and we were returning back to the old ways.
I think it was mostly about lack of trust and desire to regain a feeling of control over employees. The soft layoffs were just a bonus.
When my company WFH during covid the first thing they did was force-install invasive tracking software. You could practically taste the executive paranoia.
Maybe there's some 19D "soft layoff" motivation, but I suspect a large part is just about control and appearance. You spent all that money on offices so workers better be there. And what's the point of having your own nice big office if you can't look out on the peons toiling for you? And more fundamentally, some people just have this deep belief that work = something you do in an office and can't compute working at home as "real" work, no matter what the results show.
This article frames the behavior of Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and others as being hypocritical or misguided, that their aims are not aligned with their actions. Either the author is completely missing the point, or they're crafting a particular narrative to provide plausible deniability for these billionaires acting fully in accordance with their philosophies as they've many times publicly espoused. Far from being "pronatalist", Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, and others are only interested in rising birthrates among a particular portion of the population. Like many SV elites, they have a cozy relationship with the HBD movement within the rationalist movement, including Thiel's close association with Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug). It's /very/ obvious to anyone who has spent any time comprehending things that these billionaires are very invested in increasing birth rates among other people they consider worthy of having children, particularly elite whites, and decreasing birth rates among those they don't consider worthy of having children, particularly anyone who is not white.
To not put too fine a point on it: Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen do NOT care if their policies prevent their workers from having children. They don't want their workers having children, they only want children from the families of elite whites. They cannot be too loud in their statements, but these people are eugenicists.
I once did a six-month project where I'd go the office to sit on zoom with my team in 3 other cities. One of those cities was our offshore dev team that we hired because they cost less and could do the job remotely. How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?
Hopefully those particular CEOs are now in line for being replaced with an AI.
This is a supply shock - one with no alternatives. For people who aren't aware of just how much we depend on petrochemicals, see this video on the perils of peak-oil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg
Peak-oil may have proved "false" (not quite - only that Hubbert didn't expect a bimodal distribution), but this is a good time to come out of our illusions, not only about the "unlimited"-ness of oil, but also about creating societies that are so toxically dependent on oil.
Let's wind back to March-April 2020. If you remember, there was a brief period where because of shutdowns oil prices went negative. Commodities are generally traded at spot prices and with what are called futures contracts. A future contract allows you to schedule the purchase or sale of a commodity at a price that's agreed upon today. Producers and consumers use this to de-risk prices.
Oil futures contracts are standardized with fixed delivery dates and sizes (usually 1000 barrels per contract). So in April there was a glut and nowhere to store it becasue people stopped buying on the spot market and had trouble accepting deliveries anyway. So for a brief moment, producers had to start paying people to take oil because they had nowhere to put it. Technically, this is an example of an extreme contango market.
So the world produces and uses roughly 100M barrels per day ("bpd") of oil. OPEC+ produces 40-50% of that and they like stability in the oil market. Too low and they don't make enough money. Too high and it create political instability and economic distress. The current guidance is a floor of $70 and a ceiling of $80 is considered "ideal".
So how does OPEC+ do this? They meet every 3 months and look at projected demand and adjust supply accordingly.
In May (give or take), Trump went to MBS (Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Pricne of Saudi Arabia) and asked--begged really--him to cut production because the administration believed there would be a prolonged demand slump. Now this was largely unnecessary because OPEC would do this anyway with their 3 monthly rolling cycle.
For reasons I won't get into, this was an opportunity for MBS to get back at Donald Trump for screwing over OPEC in 2018 when Trump intentionally crashed the oil market.
Starting in June 2020 and lasting 2 years, OPEC would cut production, initially by 9.7Mbpd (going down in stages to 6.3Mbpd). That's 10% of world supply. Don't believe me? It's documented [1]. And nobody talks about it.
This was, as we now know, a disaster. Demand exploded in 2021. The now-Biden administration quietly went to MBS and asked him to reverse the cuts. He refused. It was payback. The Biden administration could've absolutely talked abou this but didn't. No Democrat did. Because no establishment Democrat wants to actually upset the oil and gas industry and interfere with American foreign policy, no matter how much huffing and puffing they do about caring about such things.
So when people ask "what happens if the Strait of Hormuz closes?" we don't need to speculate. We know exactly what happens because it's already happened. Except this time it's worse. And all of these consequences were completely foreseeable and known but were ignored. And the war with Iran is 100% unwinnable.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...
It's just vanilla (pardon the pun) white supremacy combined with the myth of meritocracy and prosperity gospel. By this I mean there is the belief that one's genes are superior because they're a billionaire. It then throw in some Nazi-era conspiracy theories like "Great Replacement" [3][4].
It's worth adding that pronatalists, as a general rule, don't believe in higher birth rates for everyone. It's inherently racist, just like banning abortion [5].
The irony is that the curent end result of this movement is that the absolutely dumbest and most incompetent people have ended up in charge because of it.
Just think about the sequence of events here. We had to WFH so companies could survive. Billionaires saw massive increases in wealth in Covid and, briefly, there was real wage growth. RTO mandates are part of a wider movement to suppress wages, combined with the permanent layoffs culture we're in now. It was never about productivity or culture.
And now because of the biggest self-own in American history (ie by starting an unwinnable war with Iran for literally no reason) we're going to see massive gas and diesel price hikes, higher food prices (because of fertilizer shortages) and higher prices for everything because of the fuel price hikes (just like 2021-2022). And now it's OK to WFH again?
It's hard to calculate how much harm and misery the wealthiest 10,000 people in the world inflict on almost 8 billion other people, so much so that the world would be demonstrably and immediately better were the billionaires actually garbage collected.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism
[2]: https://www.seenandunseen.com/transhumanism-eugenics-digital...
[3]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-is-great-replacem...
[5]: https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/the-racist-history-...
To be fair, the SV is not moving toward home office. Asian governments are moving to WFH because of high oil prices.
How did we get to this place where a small number of strange white men have soured an industry that used to give us marvels that expanded our freedom and made our lives better?
If you can name a historical figure, they were probably some flavour of non-standard mental processing and beliefs.
Even just coming up with "marvels that expanded our freedom and made our lives better" is inherently a non-standard position relative to how most people live and think.
I wonder if they can fit they people in available desks by now (After the layoffs).
I would say that the healthy response is to promote human autonomy alongside policies that show that a society cares about its most vulnerable, but what do I know.
Musk is for sure. Doesn't he have like 100 kids because he's constantly trying to get women to become pregnant by his sperm?
Also everyone on HN: "there is absolutely no good argument for working in an office and anyone who suggests it is evil."
Thats not to say there aren't other impediments. Maybe your job is legally protected onshore (military)
Nor is this a value judgement, or a prescription of a solution. Maybe lowered tech wages are the best solution for this problem. I work in a lab, I'd love for these coders to make less money and not have to compete with them economically.
But WFH is a demonstration of ability to off-shore. That's indisputable.
toomuchtodo•1h ago
It's (mostly) free! The tech bros just have to get over their status and control issues about forcing workers back into the office. Can they? Remains to be seen.
XorNot•1h ago
blitzar•1h ago