Elon Musk may be best known for his role as CEO of Tesla, but selling electric vehicles is hardly his only passion. He also loves fighting to end workers’ rights, allegedly sexually harassing employees, racism, anti-Semitism and making babies. So many babies. How the women he’s impregnated convince themselves to go through with the deed, we have no idea, but he’s already fathered 12 kids, and he’s not stopping there. According to the New York Times, Musk also wants to use his sperm to help colonize Mars.
Musk has made it clear for a long time that he has Mars in his sights. Sure, he could focus his efforts on fighting or even reversing human-caused climate change on Earth, a planet that is already habitable, but nope. He wants to colonize Mars. And over the last year, he’s reportedly been using more of his resources to make that goal a reality, assigning one team to design domes for people to live in, another to design space suits and another to research what it will take for humans to reproduce on Mars. Musk has also reportedly offered to use his sperm “to help seed a colony” on the new planet (that’s the NYT’s wording, not ours, although we choose to believe the pun was intentional.)
It’s not clear exactly how many children he plans to make for Mars, but NYT reports he recently told employees he believes there will be a million people living on Mars in 20 years. Hopefully, most of those aren’t his test tube babies because that would lead to some serious incest issues, but this is also Musk we’re talking about, so you never know. He could very easily see himself as the father of a new planet:
Over the years, Mr. Musk has dropped hints about how he thinks people would live on Mars.
One theme revolves around the continuation of human life on the planet. Scientists haven’t determined whether people can have children in space. Mr. Musk has said children won’t be allowed on the first flights to Mars because of the dangers, though he expects them to live there eventually.
But Mr. Musk has a plan. In his 2013 interview for the science video, he said he hoped to create his own species on Mars, an idea that he has repeated over the years to SpaceX employees and others close to the company.
“I think it’s quite likely that we’d want to bioengineer new organisms that are better suited to living on Mars,” he said in the interview. “Humanity’s kind of done that over time, by sort of selective breeding.”
There’s so much more to this article, we couldn’t even begin to summarize it here, so why don’t you head over to the NYT to read the full thing? Normally, there would be a paywall, but thanks to the power of gifted links, you should be able to read it without an account.