Zilis, by her own choice, decided not to get married. But she had “the motherhood bug super hard,” she says. Her maternal impulses were further stoked by Musk’s evangelizing about how important it was for people to have many children. He feared that declining birthrates were a threat to the long-term survival of human consciousness. “People are going to have to revive the idea of having children as a kind of social duty,” he said in a 2014 interview. “Otherwise civilization will just die.”
