Tesla CEO Elon Musk once again raised concerns about South Korea’s plummeting birth rate.
On Wednesday, Musk posted on X, his social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “Two-thirds of Korea will disappear every generation,” describing the situation as a “population collapse.”
Along with his post, Musk shared a graph illustrating South Korea’s birth rate based on data from the World Bank. The chart shows that this year’s total fertility rate dropped to a staggering 0.68, citing key factors contributing to the decline, such as long working hours, low wages, and declining marriage rates.
This isn’t the first time Musk has highlighted South Korea’s demographic crisis. In October, during a virtual discussion at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, he referenced South Korea’s record-low 2022 birth rate of 0.72 children. He predicted that South Korea’s population could shrink to roughly one-third of its current size if this trend continues.
Musk argued that while artificial intelligence (AI) poses the most immediate threat in the short term, the long-term challenge is the decline of the global population. He stressed, “Without making new people, humanity will not survive, rendering all other policies meaningless.”
Notably, Musk himself is known to have 11 children with multiple partners.
In September 2022, he tweeted about a Wall Street Journal article pointing out that South Korea and Hong Kong are experiencing the world’s fastest population declines.
