The Woman-Hating Lie Behind Kidmaxxing

Why the billionaires' fantasy of passing down "superior" genes is doomed to fail

I was vaguely aware of the trend toward maximal reproduction—aka “kidmaxxing”— among the billionaire tech bros but hadn’t fully absorbed the implications until recently when the New York Times illustrated a recent op-ed on the topic with an unexpectedly revealing image.

In it, a rosy cheeked man with a full head of wavy chestnut brown hair, encased in a navy blue three-piece suit with red tie, relaxes on an office chair, his legs casually crossed over each other. Over a dozen toddlers, each with the same rosy cheeks and chestnut hair, are gathered around gazing at him adoringly, clad in identical, miniaturized navy blue three piece suits.

Obvious, right? A man with his massive brood of children!

But wait a moment. Something is missing. And it exposes the woman-hating lie that fuels the entire enterprise.

More on that, below.

New York Times July 1 illustration from “Is Kidmaxxing the Ultimate Status Symbol for Ultimate Wealth?”

The Ultimate Kidmaxxing: No Moms, No Daughters

Ultra-wealthy men today are using the latest reproductive technologies to produce progeny at an industrial scale. Our favorite technoking Elon Musk (“technoking” is his actual title at Tesla) has produced fourteen children “by four women,” the New York Times reports, and has told one of his children’s mothers that he planned to use surrogates to “reach legion level.” Jeffrey Epstein reportedly planned to maintain 20 women at his ranch outside Santa Fe so that they could be “inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies.” Billionaire Stefan Soloviev has so far sired 22 children; the founder of Telegram Pavel Duroc over 100; the disgraced mogul Greg Lindberg at least 12. The fantasy-video-game maker Xu Bo claims to have fathered over 100. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Palantir’s Peter Thiel have both supported startups that offer the latest reproductive technologies to facilitate the superbaby business.

Media coverage of the new kidmaxxing industry has rightly pointed out its nakedly eugenicist goals. Kidmaxxers consider their insectoid masses of progeny a gift to humanity. Unleashing their superior genes in masses of offspring will improve the entire populace, they say, like a flood of clean water purifying a contaminated pond. It’s creepy because historically, such campaigns for “positive” eugenics, in which people with “good” genes are encouraged to have more babies, easily extends into “negative” eugenics, in which people with “bad” genes are discouraged, by forced sterilization and worse, from having any at all. (An idea with a long and sordid American history: as President Theodore Roosevelt put it in 1913, “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.”)

But the problem with these “kidmaxxers” is not just that they’re proto-Nazi eugenicists, although they are. These overpaid braggarts have also completely misunderstood the nature of reproduction.

Kali Trampling Upon Shiva, 1854

In my first book—a 1997 collection I edited called Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (one of 27 books “everyone in America should read” according to Buzzfeed)—I wrote an essay inspired by the blue demon goddess Kali. One of Kali’s interesting features is that she sprang whole from the forehead of her mother. Goddesses can do that. But unlike blue goddesses, tech bros can’t produce offspring clonally, creating little replicas of themselves. As mere mortal humans, they must submit to the whims of reproduction, like the rest of us.

That means they will have daughters, not just sons. And their genetic endowments to their children will be diluted, scrambled, and reconstructed by the bodies of women.

In previous eras, eugenicists understood that they needed to consider the genetic characteristics of mothers as carefully as that of fathers. In the early twentieth century, for example, the American Eugenics Society evaluated the traits of entire families in “Fitter Families for Future Firesides” competitions held at state fairs. Today we know much more about the contribution of our mothers to who we become. And unlike the contribution of fathers, our mothers’ contribution goes beyond genes and parenting.

So-called “epigenetic” effects were discovered in 1944-45 during the Dutch Hunger Winter, when the Nazis cut off food supply to the western part of the Netherlands. A short-lived but acute famine unfolded, during which twenty thousand people perished. Those who survived, such as the actor Audrey Hepburn, did so by eating grass and tulip bulbs. Scientists later discovered that children born to women who were pregnant during the Dutch Hunger Winter were strikingly distinct from those of their siblings conceived either before or after the famine. Compared to their siblings, they had an elevated risk of heart disease, kidney disease, and type 2 diabetes. If they were girls, they ended up having more twins than their unexposed sisters, more breast cancers, poorer cognitive function and more anxiety and depression. The mothers’ experiences of the Dutch Hunger Winter had seeped into their unborn babies, shaping them for the rest of their lives.

Because children form inside women’s bodies, not men’s, our mothers epigenetic influence on us exceeds that of our fathers. But that’s not all. The precise chemical composition of the milk our mothers nourish us with inexorably alters us. Studies in other animals show that our mothers’ low-cortisol milk makes us more sociable and risk-taking, for example, than high-cortisol milk. The nature of their microbiomes will seed our own as we pass through the birth canal, determining our immune function and the development of our brains, as a recent study in mice showed. The fact of being formed inside our mothers’ bodies tethers our bodies to hers for years after the umbilical cord is severed. Every one of us has millions of our mothers’ cells inside our bodies right now, unmixed by those from our fathers, that seeped into our bodies when we were in utero, a phenomenon known as “microchimerism.”

The kidmaxxers have decided to erase all this. To them, mothers are replaceable widgets: anonymous “surrogates” and “women” who will “carry” his sperm and bear “his” children. To them, the role of women in producing society’s future generations is little more than a logistical issue. The relative disinterest of the news media in even the names of these mothers implicitly sanctions this characterization. Imagine for a moment if Taylor Swift or Beyoncé or Oprah announced that they too would be kidmaxxing by bestowing surrogates with their superior eggs, brushing aside the role of men as something easily resolved by sperm banks or anonymous men they corralled into ranches whom nobody asked about or cared to know, and it becomes immediately clear how willfully dehumanizing the whole project and the coverage around it is.

Which brings me to the NYT illustration. For some of the kidmaxxers, siring male progeny is the whole point of kidmaxxing. The fantasy-video-game maker Xu Bo, for example, revealed in court his intention to produce “boys, because they are superior to girls” and to have “at least 50 high-quality sons.” The Times’ illustration, in which not only are mothers absent but so too are daughters, implicitly sanctions the rosy-cheeked besuited man’s fantasy: that male reproduction is actually a form of cloning.

All of this is dispiritingly oppressive to women and our agency but the silver lining is that the kidmaxxers’ goals are so wrong-headed that they are destined to fail. Only a precious few traits are controlled by single genes and even fewer by single genes that we know enough about to pinpoint. Most complex traits are shaped by multiple genes, which turn off and on in relation to each other and the mercurial micro- and macro-environment around them. Even if the kidmaxxers find genes that control traits they want in their progeny, chances are those same genes will also play a role in influencing other traits that they may not want at all. A kidmaxxer who selects an embryo with genes associated with a higher chance of educational attainment, for example, will have also selected genes that lead to a 16 percent higher risk of bipolar disorder. Sorry, Charlie!

And so flooding society with legions of Musk babies is unlikely to bestow Musk-like intellectual gifts, such as they are, upon the populace. It’s just as well since the kidmaxxers’ inability to comprehend the basic facts of reproduction suggests that their acumen may not be so superior after all.

It’s striking to me that the erasure of women in the kidmaxxing industry has been made virtually invisible. I’m also struck by how, besides the historical echo of Nazism, the fundamental problem with the underlying idea of kidmaxxing—and eugenics in general—has gone unremarked, too.

What modern genetics shows us is that aside from a few genes that code for diseases, forcing genes considered “superior” today into future populations is a self-defeating idea. The adaptive value of sexual reproduction—that is, the mixing up of our genetic inheritances with that of others with unpredictable results based on the micro-climates and environments of the future—is that it liberates us from static, fixed inheritances. We want our kids to be different than we are so they have a chance at thriving in tomorrow’s environments which will be different than today’s. The kidmaxxers think that their traits are Platonically superior and will be of value in every possible future setting. But it’s just as likely that the narcissism and ruthlessness that showered them with riches in today’s society will be useless and debilitating traits that their future children will be forced to overcome through costly, concerted efforts.