Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens for the delivery of clues about the past. According to interviews with people familiar with the matter and public information obtained on August 15, the foundation of Tesla CEO Elon Musk donated $10 million to the University of Texas at Austin in 2021 to support a new fertility and population research project.

Over the years, Musk has spoken bluntly about the danger of population collapse on many occasions. As it turns out, the billionaire is not always "talking without practice".

The Musk Foundation donated $10 million to the University of Texas at Austin in 2021 to "support population research projects," one of the largest donations in the foundation's history and one of the largest donations to higher education, according to the Musk Foundation's tax documents.

By interviewing more than a dozen demographers and reviewing several academic documents, Musk's donation is related to the population Welfare Initiative (PWI), a new interdisciplinary research group dedicated to population research at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mr Musk and representatives of his foundation did not respond to requests for comment.

PWI is a joint project of the University of Texas's Department of Economics and the University's Center for demographic Studies (PRC), which employs a number of economists, sociologists, philosophers and demographers.

The project is led by Dean Spears, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Texas, and Rutgers faculty member Mark Budolfson (Mark Budolfson) has been appointed deputy director and "philosophy coordinator". Together, they published articles on utilitarianism, fertility and climate change in peer-reviewed journals. The two also published research on effective altruism, a philanthropic philosophy that is popular among Silicon Valley billionaires, including Mr Musk.

Spears declined to comment and referred the question to the university's public relations staff. Mr. Burdorfson didn't respond to an email request for comment.

Musk, who has at least 10 children in fear of population collapse, said the UN forecast for population growth was "complete nonsense". He supported the deprivation of the citizenship of the childless and praised the benefits of childbearing. In 2021, the year he donated money, Musk said population collapse "may be the greatest risk to the future of human civilization".

Some of the more than 20 studies on the PWI project echo Musk's views. Several documents focus on the decline in fertility, including a white paper in 2021. Others belong to the so-called "long-term doctrine", a branch of effective altruism that focuses on preventing things that could lead to the collapse of civilization. One of the papers argues that humans may become "extinct" because of declining fertility. Of course, there are also papers on other topics, such as animal welfare.

It is not clear what Musk hopes to achieve by donating money to the University of Texas. Musk bought Twitter, renamed X, for $44 billion last October, and he has about 153 million followers on the platform.

"Musk has a lot of influence on Twitter," said Laura Lindberg, a professor at Rutgers University's School of Public Health. "in the end, it may even be more influential than papers published in academic journals." Lindbergh attended a two-day fertility conference held by PWI last October.

The October PWI conference was funded by Musk, according to Leslie Root, a postdoctoral scholar and demographer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and two other attendees. PWI did not disclose Musk's involvement to scholars who were invited to fly in from all over the country, Mr. Lute said.

Ruth does not support Musk's views on fertility. He said many attendees were surprised to learn that the world's richest man was behind the event.

Several academic researchers said that although they were uncomfortable with Musk's link to the study, they did not doubt the reliability of the PWI staff or the fertility study as a whole.

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