Elon Musk might be making headlines this week for losing his trial against Sam Altman—but I’m more fascinated by how the billionaire has helped normalize technology aimed at optimizing childbearing.
In a piece I wrote with Julia Black, we revealed that Musk used embryo-selection technology—which allows parents to rank embryos for intelligence—for at least some of his reported 14 children. Many more techies are following in Musk’s footsteps: I’ve spoken with founders and AI engineers who are doing IVF as a first resort so that they can use embryo-selection services like Nucleus, which is backed by firms founded by Peter Thiel and Alexis Ohanian. And then, after they’ve selected their preferred embryos, some tech elites are opting to have “twiblings,” implanting embryos in two surrogates at once to have babies born around the same time.
The future of fertility tech is both bright and unsettling. Speaking of which: I’m Margaux MacColl, filling in for Julia Black—and my column today is on Colossal Biosciences and the new technologies bringing artificial wombs closer to reality.
Mentioned in this issue: Cannes Film Festival, Seth Rogen, Demi Moore, Steven Soderbergh, Dario Amodei, Eric Schmidt, Polymarket, Kevin O’Leary, Donald Trump, Palantir, Anthropic, SpaceX, Simone Collins, xAI, Grok, John Lennon, OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, and more… | 
