Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/24/in-1926-women-bred-like-livestock-to-claim-a-demented-tycoons-fortune.html
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It seems particularly brutal to structure such a contest with nothing but depression-era childcare expenses for second place and beyond.
Running it at all is all sorts of ethically dodgy; but 9 children and $0 seems dramatically worse than 10 and $125,000.
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Could have been worse. If some jerk had made a will like this after artificial insemination became reliable, there would have been parents trying to produce triplets and quads every year for a decade. On the other hand, by then there would also probably be more chance that a will like this would be struck down as unconscionable.
Alas, I suspect in 1926 it would more likely be the father’s idea, with the mother bearing (sorry) most of the risk. Given the level of pregnancy-related mortality, I wonder how many deaths were caused by this will.
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Um, just how many kids Elon has already through his one man breeding programme?
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Is this characterization really necessary? And the livestock part? The contest was all kinds of fucked up, but we don’t need to dehumanize the participants.
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Slightly related, from today’s Guardian.
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Yeah. I couldn’t really read the post because the head is all kinds of fucked up.
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I’m finding it hard to fathom the thought process of someone who professes to be concerned about the possibility of massive suffering in the future, to the extent of discounting the present; and responds by pumping out as many prospective sufferers as possible.
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Thought process? You’re giving him too much credit.
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It’s an entire movement.
Thw ingenious thing about longtermism is that, according to its tenets, the best way for a philanthropist to use their wealth for good is…to promote longtermism by donating to longtermist organisations.
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Fixed it for ya! 
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I’m familiar with the ‘movement’; I’m just baffled by how his litttle brood-cult squares with it.
He’s on board with the usual “his branch of effective altruism considers the suffering of humans today to be “pretty irrelevant” because the suffering of billions of future humans could be eliminated if they succeed in creating a “technophilic, interplanetary” species.” stuff; but they also profess extreme concern over ““There are going to be countries of old people starving to death,”” which is the sort of short-term problem that would get longtermed under the rug without a care if it were inconvenient; but which they are apparently super concerned about. Fretting about surrogacy being ‘inegalitarian’ when you are also longterm-ing your actions into being unimaginably important because you are the representative of eleventy-zillion denizens of the future is also puzzling at best.
I’m hardly surprised surprised at the apparent inconsistency; in practice ‘longtermism’ seems to boil down to just making up a number of future people whose interests conveniently align with yours in order to justify whatever it is you wanted to do anyway; but it still seems pretty glaring, especially when the other half of the exercise is preening about how objective and data driven you are.
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The starving ones are poor people, Michael. 
Elon’s own brood will live on the floating space station, or own Hawaii, or be busy mining Mars (or all of the above, thanks to Volume) while the poors fight for crumbs.
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Rightful criticism of asshats like Musk aside, that’s some problematic phrasing there, Mark; as women do not “breed” asexually.
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