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Elon Musk is a eugenicist
His views on genetics, race, and our future are alarmingly reminiscent of one of the worst social movements of the 20th century.
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I’m incensed by what’s happening in Washington, D.C., but I generally avoid writing too much about it because there are already a million takes on the topic, and I don’t think people need yet another voice on this. I try not to be alarmist.
But since Elon Musk is the co-President¹ of the United States now, his views are more salient than any of us would like them to be.
Having watched Musk, and having studied eugenics pretty extensively in the past,² I’ve concluded that Elon Musk is a eugenicist. This is as alarming as any other trend I’m seeing today.
What is eugenics?
Eugenics is a pseudo-scientific movement that tries to increase the frequency of so-called “good” or “favorable” genes and decrease the frequency of so-called “bad” or “unfavorable” genes.
On its face, that doesn’t sound so unreasonable. What makes it bad?
Eugenics uses the cudgel of science to allow people in power to strip agency and personhood from people they see as different or lesser.
The crux of the issue: there is no objective definition of good genes. Someone, usually in a position of power, gets to decide what the “good” genes are. What that often means is that people who aren’t in their group—often defined along racial or ethnic lines—have “bad” genes.
Eugenics has been used to justify all sorts of atrocities. The Nazis not only used it as evidence of Aryan superiority but as justification for the forced sterilization and murder of people with so-called “undesirable” traits—everything from epilepsy to blindness to homosexuality.³
Tragically, this wasn’t limited to Nazi Germany. California alone forcibly sterilized 20,000 people—people who were disproportionately Black, Mexican-American, and Native American—without their consent and in many cases without their knowledge.⁴ This happened across the United States.⁵
Between the ’30s and the ’70s, “approximately one-third of Puerto Rico’s female population of childbearing age had undergone the [sterilization] operation, the highest rate in the world.”⁶
Because of its indelible connection to the Nazis, the movement largely fell out of favor after World War II.
What makes a eugenicist?
Here’s the Wikipedia definition: “Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter the frequency of various human phenotypes by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups they considered inferior, or promoting that of those considered superior.”
Elon Musk is, in that textbook sense, a classic eugenicist
Using that definition, a eugenicist has three characteristics:
A desire to alter the frequency of various human phenotypes in order to improve the genetic quality of the human population.
A belief in accomplishing that goal by promoting the genetics of those considered superior.
A belief in accomplishing that goal by inhibiting the genetics of those considered inferior.
Musk demonstrates all three. For a person in his position of power, this is enormously alarming.
1. “A desire to alter the frequency of various human phenotypes”
Back in 2015, Musk said he wasn’t interested in “genetic reprogramming.” Why? “You know, I call it the Hitler Problem. Hitler was all about creating the Übermensch and genetic purity, and it's like—how do you avoid the Hitler Problem? I don't know.”
These days, Musk—salute and all⁷—seems a lot less concerned with the Hitler problem, and his desire to “alter the frequency of various human phenotypes” goes beyond his flippant jokes about Hitler and Nazism.
Here’s a Musk quote from Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future: “There’s this point that Mike Judge makes in Idiocracy, which is like smart people, you know, should at least sustain their numbers. Like, if it’s a negative Darwinian vector, then obviously that’s not a good thing.”⁸
He retweeted a lengthy post about Patrick Collison’s excitement about using tools like CRISPR for literal genetic editing—a total 180 from Musk’s position 10 years prior.
Most directly: he talks about the need to supplement human intelligence with robotics.
Does Musk have a desire to alter the frequency of various human phenotypes? Yes—though given advances in technology, this goes far beyond anything that even the early eugenicists could have conceived of.⁹
2. “Promoting the genetics of those considered superior”
This is the clearest of the three. Musk is repeatedly on the record talking about how smart people and rich people—namely, himself—should be having more children.
Here’s a description of why Musk wanted to have children with one of his subordinates: “Shivon Zilis…was persuaded by Musk to consider him as the donor, a proposal that aligned with Musk’s advocacy for procreation among the intellectually inclined. ‘He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,’ Zilis said.”
Given how many children Musk has—more than a baker’s dozen and counting with at least three women and probably more¹⁰—it’s hard to be a good parent even under normal circumstances, and his circumstances are hardly normal.¹¹ The subtext is that he doesn’t need to parent; with his genes, the children will be just fine.
Does Musk want to promote the genetics of those he considers superior? I think it’s safe to take Shivon Zilis’ words and Musk’s actions at face value here: yes, he does. This one is an open and shut case.
3. “Inhibiting the genetics of those considered inferior”
The vast majority of Americans agree that racism is bad.¹² I bring this up because even for Musk, coming out publicly in favor of “inhibiting the genetics of those he considers inferior” would be too plainly racist, at least for now.
But the mosaic of information that we have about Musk—statements he’s made, comments he’s endorsed, views he’s espoused—suggest to me two things:
I have little doubt that, if the door were cracked open even slightly on this issue, he’d have no hesitation supporting this.
Even more concerningly, I worry that his views, and the people he surrounds himself with, will shift the Overton window and make these sorts of views dangerously mainstream.
The way that Musk talks about people he sees as inferior paints an incredibly sinister picture.
Dismissiveness of people he sees as unintelligent
Musk is consistent in his use of “retard” and “retarded” as insults.¹³ That has a material impact; use of those words triples on Twitter after Musk uses them. More to the point, to quote an op-ed in The Guardian, using those words is “an attack on someone’s personhood.”
We can write off comments about IQ tests before posting online as flippant trolling. But his consistent use of that slur speaks to something much deeper—especially in this context, when people with intellectual disabilities were so often the victims of early eugenics. Their personhood is unimportant to him.
Musk’s views on race, especially Black people
Speaking of IQ, Musk liked a tweet that claimed Black students at HBCUs have lower IQs. He claimed that prioritizing diversity over safety is the only reason that United Airlines has any Black pilots.
He is consistently skeptical of Black people in positions of power,¹⁴ and Tesla has been sued multiple times for discrimination against Black employees.
One of the first things Musk did in his capacity with DOGE was to shut down USAID—a program that provided food, medical assistance, and humanitarian aid across Africa. USAID saved millions of lives.
All of this paints the picture of a man who thinks little of Black people, creates a hostile work environment for them, and cares little for the suffering of Africans.¹⁵
Race and immigration
There is one exception to that: Musk cares deeply about the plight of Africans when they’re White.
At the same time that he’s shutting down USAID, Musk has consistently been up in arms about how White South Africans are being treated despite having much higher levels of wealth and land ownership than Black South Africans, and despite being much less likely to be victims of murder and other violent crime.
The Trump Administration, at the same time that they’re shutting down refugee resettlement just about everywhere, is moving full steam ahead on a refugee resettlement program for White South Africans.
It’s all hauntingly reminiscent of what happened a century ago: “With the Immigration Act of 1924, eugenicists succeeded in implementing federal restrictions on immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries.”
Musk literally hires employees who publicly promote eugenics
Marko Elez—a DOGE staffer who has explicitly called for eugenics—resigned when tweets espousing those views became public. I wish that were the end of the story.
No, Musk re-hired Elez shortly thereafter. Being a eugenicist is hardly disqualifying in Musk’s federal government; perhaps it’s a prerequisite.
The sum total of everything is frightening
Does Musk want to inhibit the genetics of those he considers inferior?
Well, he hasn’t said so explicitly. But a) he surrounds himself with people who do say so explicitly, b) he shares views with some of the most nefarious early eugenicists, c) he openly mocks people he thinks are dumb and disabled, d) he’s endorsed views that espouse the dangers of Jews and the racial inferiority of Blacks, and e) the actions he’s taking will lead to the deaths of many Black Africans—whose welfare he seems unconcerned with, unlike White Africans.
My conclusion, based on all of this, is an alarming but emphatic yes. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
The eugenicists are in power
The irony of Musk’s eugenics is that some of his traits—his battle with depression and his autism, for instance—would have been categorized as weak or feeble genes by a different era of eugenicists.
But of course, this gets at the core of eugenics: the people in power get to decide what the good genes are. For Musk, and for all eugenicists, anyone who isn’t like him is inherently inferior.
It’d be easy to write this off as troll behavior. It’s not. There are things that Musk does as a troll, but he approaches all of this with seriousness. Donald Trump, by the way, espouses a lot of these same views.¹⁶
Eugenics was, in an earlier era, a harbinger of much more danger to come for people locked out of power. I hope that Musk’s support for eugenics doesn’t lead to its renewed relevance—and I certainly hope that it’s not the harbinger of something worse.
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My joke footnote is that I was surprised to learn that the U.S. has something in common with they’ve-got-two-heads-of-state countries like Andorra and San Marino. My serious footnote is that it’s extremely undemocratic and bad.
My high school was founded by one of the most prominent eugenicists in America, Ezra Gosney. In a famous letter to Gosney, Charles Goethe (another prominent eugenicist) wrote after his trip to Germany in 1934: “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program.”
(People going on trips to Germany in 1934 were generally not up to much good.)
When I was in high school, there was still a building at the school named after him—something a group of us fought to change. There was remarkable opposition to that effort, though the school ultimately relented. As a consequence of this effort, I ended up deep in the weeds on the history of eugenics.
“400,000 people were sterilized against their will, while up to 300,000 were murdered under the Aktion T4 euthanasia program,” according to Wikipedia. For a host of reasons, this is likely an undercount—not least of which is that a lot of this same “science” that was used to justify Aryan superiority was also used as an underpinning of the Holocaust.
This was enabled by Buck v. Bell, an 8-1 Supreme Court decision in 1927 that ruled that forced sterilization of people with “imbecility” was legal. In a long history of shameful Supreme Court rulings, this is one of their most shameful.
Americans were, in many ways, the model for the Nazis—Goethe mentioned this in his letter to Gosney that I talked about in the second footnote. There’s literally a section, on the Wikipedia page for Eugenics in the United States, titled “Influence on Nazi Germany.” It’s one of our darkest chapters.
Many, though not all, were performed without consent. It’s tough to get totally accurate data here, in part because many people who got these procedures with “consent” did so with false, misleading, or otherwise coercive information from doctors.
To be honest, I don’t have a strong perspective on whether this was a “real” Nazi salute or just an awkward hand gesture. The debate loses sight of the much broader problem when it comes to Musk and Nazis. His support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland and his dismissiveness of “Never Again” are much more alarming to me, and where we really should be focusing our attention.
I’ll note three things here:
Later in the quote, Musk says, “I’m not saying like only smart people should have kids. I’m just saying that smart people should have kids as well.” I read that less as an endorsement of “everyone should have kids” and more as a rhetorical device. The way I read this, really, is: “I’m not saying all dumb people [defined by me, Elon Musk] should stop having kids, but I am saying that too many dumb people [defined by me, Elon Musk] are having kids.”
The fact that he invokes Darwinism here is itself telling, since Social Darwinism was very much the first cousin of eugenics. Its core tenet, in short, is that differences between nations and races are a function only of “survival of the fittest,” and therefore the more prosperous races are inherently superior.
What he’s saying is in line with what the Human Betterment Foundation, a prominent pro-eugenics organization run by none other than Ezra Gosney, wrote in 1938: “Births among families habitually living on public charity are often 50% higher than births among self-supporting families. The families that contribute children to the state homes for the feebleminded in California, are multiplying about twice as rapidly as the rest of the population.”
It’s been well reported that Musk uses IVF to conceive most of his children. One of his children recently accused him of using IVF to select for boys—and it is true that Musk has far more sons than daughters. However:
Vivian Wilson, who was assigned male at birth and now identifies as female, very publicly feuds with her father. (Musk, for good measure, said that Vivian was “dead” because she transitioned.) Vivian may be right—candidly, I’m inclined to think she is—but because of her antipathy for her father, she’s not a reliable narrator, and so I’m not using it as evidence to support the point around altering the frequency of human phenotypes. (Many countries, but not the United States, have laws that prohibit sex selection as part of the IVF process.)
Yes, Musk has more sons than daughters, but not in a way that’s totally out of the question for just random chance. Furthermore, for reasons we don’t fully understand, male billionaires are far more likely to have sons than the general population. It’s about 50/50 for the general population, but male billionaires have a 65% chance of having a son with any given child, according to a 2009 study.
One of the stranger legacies of eugenics is that it gave rise to couples counseling and marriage counseling. The movement began in Germany in the 1920s and was promoted in the U.S. by Paul Popenoe, one of America’s most prominent eugenicists. The thought was that it was important to keep couples of “good stock” together, basically.
This is all one big lead-in to the joke that Musk would maybe benefit from some couples counseling.
I suspect there are not many parents who tend to more children, more moms, more companies, and more U.S. Presidents than Musk.
What the poll technically says: “A strong majority (91%) of Americans believe everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, deserves an equal opportunity to succeed.” (Obviously, the question of how we do that is much more controversial.) I think if you asked the question, “is racism bad?”, you’d get even more people saying yes. But this is the closest data that I could find.
I debated whether to use the euphemism “the r-word” but decided against it, because I don’t know if everyone knows what that refers to. I avoided using the words themselves again when the context became clear.
Evidence from Musk’s father Errol to substantiate that Elon wasn’t racist included the following: “We had several black servants who were their friends.” Which, if they’re trying to argue that they’re not racist, doesn’t really help their cause.
All of us are more than the product of where and when we grew up. But the fact that Musk grew up in apartheid South Africa—one of the most deeply bigoted, institutionally racist countries of the 20th century—does feel salient.
What’s particularly idiotic about Trump’s so-called racehorse theory, among a million other things, is that breeding horse races hasn’t led to faster thoroughbreds. Of dirt track horse racing records that Equibase tracks, exactly one out of 28 has been set in the last 10 years. (For good measure, the one record that was set—3½ furlongs, at a track in Alberta that’s since closed—is an unusually short distance that’s hardly ever run. And even that was set nine years and 11 months ago. No records have been set since then.)
Compare that to the Olympics, where new records are set all the time, and where there isn’t prescriptive breeding. Obviously genetics matter a ton, but it turns out that training, attitude, willpower, and luck (and technology) also make huge differences. To quote Gattaca: “After all, there is no gene for fate.”
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