Elon Musk's father suggests having babies should be more like breeding horses

The alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk framed the 2024 election and their bond has only deepened since.

Musk has been a regular fixture at the president-elect's Florida mansion and the pair have introduced their families.

He has been privy to phone conversations with world leaders, consulted with Trump on his cabinet picks and even hosted him at Space X for the launch of the Starship rocket.

Musk will co-chair the new Department of Government Efficiency, charged with cutting government spending.

But how might the entrepreneur's other views affect Trump policy?

The cause closest to Musk's heart is pronatalism, a pro-birth political and personal ideology in which reproduction is the key goal of humanity.

Musk regularly posts on social media with fears about population decline, sometimes bordering on obsession.

"Population collapse is coming... Earth is almost empty of humans," he wrote recently.

"Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy we should teach fear of childlessness," he added.

The frequency of these posts has increased in recent months.

Musk has at least 11 children, by three different women. Some of them have spent time with him in recent weeks at Donald Trump's home.

Few understand the origin of Musk's pro-birth views better than his own father, Errol Musk - an engineer and businessman from South Africa, who has a strained relationship with his son.

I speak to Errol on a video call from his home near Cape Town.

"Elon doesn't try to push his opinion across, but he will have an opinion," he says.

Errol has seven children himself, ranging in age from Elon at 53 to his youngest daughter, who is five. He's also a pronatalist.

"We're not here to enjoy boating or flying or skiing or kite surfing, or something," he says.

"We are here to continue being here. We should all be worried about declining populations, any country with any industry should be worried."

Certain countries - like the United States, United Kingdom and Japan - do have ageing populations. But my conversation with Errol also reveals views which veer toward selective breeding.

I ask him about a comment Elon reportedly made to a biographer several years ago. Musk Jr apparently said: "If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, then that's probably bad."

I ask Errol Musk if that viewpoint is bordering on eugenics.

"I wouldn't call it eugenics as such, but every nation has practiced a certain form of survival of the fittest.

"One need only go to England and go to the Cheltenham area, the horse breeding area, and say, 'Look, we're not going to breed the horses anymore by any form of standard. I've got a few old horses I've found in Nigeria and we're going to just mix them with your race horses…'

"They'll say, no, no, no, no, no," he added.

A more sanitised version of pro-family politics took centre stage on the campaign trail.

At a rally, Donald Trump declared himself "the father of fertilisation" and vowed to make in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) free for anyone who needs it.

Sky News has been invited inside an IVF clinic in California, the world capital for fertility.

The fertility institute is in the Encino area of Los Angeles and allows patients to choose the eye colour of their baby as well as its gender.

Dr Jeffrey Steinberg was among the first fertility doctors to offer gender selection. He is taking future President Trump's pledge to offer free IVF at face value.

"Donald Trump for better or for worse, tends to keep his word. And the sort of the pooh-poohing of what he was saying... I think it's vanished because they're realising that it's probably going to happen. So all the fertility centres are gearing up for a huge surge."

Elon Musk has donated millions of dollars to fertility research.

"Musk is a technocrat," Dr Steinberg says. "He's an intellectual genius in multiple areas. And everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

"There's not much that evolves as quickly as Musk's technology. But IVF has done that, and I think he's going to find that very attractive."

While espousing his pronatalist views, Musk is navigating his own complicated family dynamic.

In the hills outside Austin, Texas, there are rumours he's bought a multi-million-dollar compound to house some of his children and their mothers together, with his own property 10 minutes away.

Musk denies this is true.

But soon he could be helping to design family policy across the country.

(c) Sky News 2024: Elon Musk's father suggests having babies should be more like breeding horses