Elon Musk appeared to defend a report that he fathered twins with an employee at his Neuralink startup, in what seemed to be a public acknowledgment of his paternity.
“Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” he posted on Twitter on Thursday.
Hours earlier, Insider reported that Shivon Zilis, an employee from his brain-chip implant company, gave birth to their twin babies a few weeks before he fathered a second child with the musician Grimes, citing court documents it obtained.
Tesla officially disbanded its public relations team two years ago and no longer responds to press inquiries for comment. The company did not immediately reply to Fortune’s request for comment.
Relationships with subordinates that are not cleared through internal governance procedures can often be grounds for dismissal, as CNN boss Jeff Zucker found out earlier this year. Some took to social media to demand the Tesla board of directors take disciplinary action to prevent it happening with any employee at the carmaker.
But on Thursday, Musk seemed to frame his reportedly new children as just him doing his part to ensure the survival of the human species.
“A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” added Musk, who has long been vocal about his fears humanity is slowly dying out. “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis.”
While 83 countries comprising nearly half of the world’s population have fertility rates that have fallen below the replacement threshold—including China and Japan notably—the United Nations warned in 2017 that global food stocks will have to sustain more than 11 billion people by the end of the century, rather than the 7.6 billion at the time.
“With roughly 83 million people being added to the world’s population every year, the upward trend in population size is expected to continue, even assuming that fertility levels will continue to decline,“ it concluded.
Musk has found himself under greater scrutiny following his $44 billion takeover bid for Twitter, which could see Donald Trump’s Twitter privileges reinstated.
Just after he warned that the media would increasingly attack his character, Insider reported in May that SpaceX had paid $250,000 to a flight stewardess on a corporate jet, who had allegedly been sexually harassed by Musk.
Tesla bulls themselves have pleaded with Musk to stop alienating customers with increasingly political diatribes on Twitter against the Democratic Party. Musk complied with a sudden holiday from social media, breaking a 10-day absence on July 1 to post a picture of his visit with Pope Francis.
Unusual for a wealthy celebrity, the picture featured the unpixellated faces of four of his children.
