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Elon Musk is responsible for “killing the world’s poorest children,” says Bill Gates
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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I mean... Bill Gates was on the eugenics hobby horse of "Brown countries are having too many children" for decades before this. His original foray into West Africa was about forcing contraception on people in order to curb their population growth. The revelation that vaccination reduced infant mortality and lead to local women no longer feeling like they needed to have six kids and hope two survived was a happy little accident of history.
The irony is in how Elon and RFK Jr's war on vaccinations is a Dark MAGA Reflection of this philosophy. They've embraced eugenics from the white side of things, by buying into revanchist Alpha Male / Survival of the Fittest pseudo-science and concluding high infant mortality is some kind of longtermist beneficial genetic selection scheme.
But it bares remembering that both of these billionaire personality cults came out of the Jeffery Epstein / Steven Pinker influence peddling project. The Gates Foundation is ultimately focused on patenting and rent-seeking high end medical technologies to state governments in exchange for lower mortality rates - effectively ruling the Global South through economic extortion. The Musk/Thiel Network State project is focused on explicitly segregating the population into In-Groups and Out-Groups, with the intention of forcibly breeding Alpha Male Humans to dominate the Global South militarily.
Neither of these two groups is benefiting The World's Poorest Children. They're just arguing how to force poor people into subsistence level wages on industrial plantations - via the Velvet Glove or the Iron Fist.
And yet that’s also not the same. Yes, many impoverished countries are stuck in a cycle of poverty by overpopulation and too high a birth rate. Yes, helping them control that goes a long way toward helping them to help themselves. No, not eugenics
That's simply not true. Countries with large populations regularly produce enormous quantities of materials and offer professional services that post-industrial consumers pay high prices to access.
The problem isn't the size of the population but the share of revenue received by the people doing the work.
Diamond miners in Nigeria and Congo and South Africa aren't getting anywhere near the face value of the rocks they dig up. Call center workers and IT professionals in the Philippines and India are getting a tiny fraction of the rate their employers charge. Textile workers seeing pennies on the $100 when they output luxury apparel.
No. Charging them through the nose for medical technology is what's hurting them.