Billionaire, businessman, and investor Elon Musk took to the stage at a conservative political festival in Rome on Saturday. The event was organized by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her party the Brothers of Italy. The annual Christmas party was hosted in Rome and has been running since 1998.
As the star guest of the event, Musk claimed to be a leading environmentalist—as the founder of the electric car maker Tesla—but added that oil and gas should not be demonized and that “climate change is exaggerated in the short term”. Throughout the interview he also cracked down on the “woke mind virus” as “very divisive” and “no fun”. He then encouraged strict laws for immigration, though he said he was “very much in favor of legal migration”. And, when asked about, artificial intelligence said it is an “inevitable thing” and will be a new "species".
"AI is an existential risk, we need to be careful with the advent of AI, but it is very much a double-edged sword, AI is the magic genie,” said Musk, adding, “The tale of magic genies usually doesn’t turn out so well, so be careful what you wish for.”
While addressing the crowd Musk also encouraged Italians to have more children. And it's no wonder. Despite Musk's interest in procreation, Italy does have one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
Between January and June of 2023 there were 3,500 fewer births than in the same period of 2022, according to data from national statistics ISTAT. And in the year 2022, birth rates fell for a 14th consecutive drop by 1.7% to 1.18 for women of Italian nationality, and 1.24 to include new mothers who are immigrants. To address these unprecedented numbers, Meloni set aside around 1 billion euros to combat the declining birth rate in October.
Surrogacy, which has given Musk two of his children, was not mentioned during the event, as it is criminalized in Italy. But despite their differing views on surrogacy, Meloni and Musk met each other for over an hour in June. According to reports, the two share concerns regarding the risks of artificial intelligence and Italy’s shrinking birth rate.
“Immigration isn’t enough to combat population shrinking,” said Musk during the event. “There is value in cultures, we don’t want Italy as a culture to disappear, we want to maintain a reasonable cultural identity of those countries or they won’t be those countries,” Musk added.
“It’s important to have children and create the new generation. As simple as it sounds, if people do not have children there is no new generation.”
Musk was also asked about the health of his company X, formerly known as Twitter, following a mass exodus of advertisers. A report claimed that pro-Nazi content was appearing next to the company ad, and that, in combination with Musk seeming to support an antisemitic claim, outraged advertisers.
Tesla appears to be in hot water as well, as earlier this week the company filed a recall report covering more than 2 million vehicles after it was determined by a US auto-safety regulator that the vehicles Autopilot does not do enough to prevent misuse.
But Musk said, “I think X will be fine,” adding that he is already “seeing advertisers return”.
Musk took one of his 11 children on stage with him and posed for photos before he spoke at the event. Some have criticized Musk's procreation ideology as a scheme to tighten the “reigns on workers and women", as opposed to an effort to save humanity as he has sometimes argued.