When Billionaires Breed: The Assault on Everyday Family Life

Meanwhile, the median house itself has morphed from a symbol of stability into an unattainable trophy. In 1985, the median U.S. home cost $82,800 and the median household earned $23,620, a price‑to‑income ratio of about 3.5. Four decades later, the median home price is $426,800 while median household income is $83,730, putting the ratio above 5.0. In coastal cities the ratio approaches 10 or higher. As prices soar relative to pay, the dream of forming a family in the traditional way recedes.

A tale of two baby booms

Enter the billionaire benefactors who see the fertility crisis not as a social failure but as a business opportunity. Pavel Durov, the Russian‑born founder of Telegram, has quietly turned his bank account into an implicit eugenics fund. For fifteen years he donated his sperm to a Moscow clinic, financing free in vitro fertilization for women under 37 who would use his “in‑demand” biomaterial. In interviews he brags that he has fathered around 100 children across 12 countries and promises to leave his multibillion‑dollar fortune to all of them. To those of us struggling to pay rent, the idea that a tech mogul could populate a small town with his genetics and call it philanthropy feels dystopian.

He is not alone. A slice of Silicon Valley’s elite has adopted natalism as a quasi‑religion. Elon Musk has at least 14 children with at least four women and has publicly mused about needing “legion‑level” offspring to stave off civilizational collapse. According to reporting, Musk has used his platform to solicit additional mothers, offered them generous stipends, and even recommended caesarean sections because he believes surgical births yield larger brains. Musk and his fixers manage NDAs and financial arrangements with the mothers, sometimes cutting support when they resist demands. For these men, reproduction is a strategic exercise: they combine wealth, advanced reproductive technology and legal firepower to conjure dynasties. They treat procreation as a perk of affluence rather than a civic responsibility.

This phenomenon is not limited to Russia or Silicon Valley. Recent investigations show Chinese billionaires flocking to the United States to build “mega‑families” through surrogacy programs. U.S. law grants citizenship to any baby born on its soil, and surrogacy is illegal in China, so wealthy businessmen spend up to $200,000 per child to ship their genetic material abroad. One billionaire, video‑game magnate Xu Bo, reportedly has over 100 children, and a California clinic owner admitted to filling an order for 100 children for a single Chinese parent. In another case, a wealthy Chinese executive hired American models as egg donors to produce ten daughters, planning to marry them off to powerful men. These “breeding programmes” are sold as solutions to falling birth rates but amount to little more than private eugenics projects.

The cost of engineered fertility

How are these billionaire baby booms even possible? IVF is extremely expensive: a single cycle in the United States averages $15,000–$20,000, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Most couples require 2.5 cycles to conceive, pushing costs over $40,000. Preimplantation genetic testing, used to screen for desired traits, can add another $10,000 or more. Surrogacy is even pricier. GoodRx reports that the average surrogacy arrangement in the United States runs $150,000 to $200,000, including agency fees, medical costs, legal services and surrogate compensation. These price tags are trivial for billionaires but ruinous for ordinary families.

Ironically, while these wealthy men claim to be rescuing civilization from demographic decline, their own industries and policies have contributed to the very conditions that suppress fertility. Housing speculation by investors and zoning policies have fueled price spikes. Tech firms have engineered gig‑economy jobs that push down wages and reduce job security. The same venture capitalists who celebrate “pro‑natalism” have lobbied against labor protections, childcare subsidies and public housing investments. Their answer to the fertility crisis is not to make family life affordable but to clone themselves at scale.

Why the middle class matters

Declining fertility is not just a cultural issue; it is a threat to democracy. Birth rates in the United States have fallen from 2.08 children per woman in 1990 to 1.64 in 2020, hitting a record low of 1.599 last year. New research suggests that rising housing costs alone explain more than half of the drop in U.S. fertility between the 2000s and the 2010s. Indeed, fertility declines have grave fiscal implications: a shrinking working‑age population strains Social Security and Medicare and undermines social cohesion. Countries like Russia, where severe housing shortages, low wages and political instability have produced one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, offer a cautionary tale.

When ordinary people cannot afford to build families, the cultural ground is ripe for authoritarian solutions. In Russia, the government promotes pronatalist policies while suppressing dissent. In China, the one‑child policy gave way to a surrogacy market for the super‑rich. In the United States, we now face the grotesque spectacle of foreign moguls exploiting our surrogacy laws to manufacture heirs.

Our civic ideal is that a broad, stable middle class sustains democracy. When only oligarchs can afford to reproduce at scale, that ideal collapses.

Fixing the fundamentals

There is nothing wrong with wanting children the “old fashioned” way, through love, commitment and shared sacrifice. What is wrong is that our political economy makes that path nearly impossible. Students graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt; wages for young men have declined in real terms; rents and home prices have outpaced earnings; childcare is crushingly expensive.

It’s tempting to view the celebrity sperm donors and mega‑broods as quirky tabloid fodder. But when the richest people on Earth respond to a fertility crisis by breeding dozens of heirs while the rest of us forgo parenthood entirely, it signals a structural failure. If we continue down this path, we risk becoming a nation of serfs working to support the castles of the pro‑natalist elite.

Judges and legislators should scrutinize surrogacy arrangements that amount to international human trafficking and ensure that American citizenship is not for sale (at least not for less than a Trump Gold Card). More importantly, voters should demand policies that make it possible for overeducated and underpaid citizens to build the families they desire, without needing the patronage of a billionaire.