billionaires are having 100 kids

If I asked you what billionaires are most anxious about right now, you'd probably say AI, taxes, or the next election. The actual answer, for a specific and growing slice of the ultra-wealthy, is… that not enough people are being born.

Elon Musk has said it plainly: "Low birth rates will end civilization." He's put his own family where his mouth is, with 14 known children across multiple partners, and he's funded population research aimed at reversing the trend.

Malcolm and Simone Collins, a couple who left tech and VC to become the public face of the pronatalist movement, have four kids and want at least seven, ideally twelve, screening embryos by IVF along the way. They headline NatalCon, which is a real annual conference built around the cause. JD Vance calls falling birth rates a "civilizational crisis." Peter Thiel funds people making that argument.

This isn't a fringe internet subculture anymore. It's a funded, organized movement with a conference circuit and direct lines into the current administration. And it sits right next to a much less discussed industry: American women getting paid to have the babies that wealthy foreigners, especially wealthy Chinese clients, can't have any other way.

Meet the man with 100+ kids.

Xu Bo, the Chinese video-game billionaire behind Duoyi Network, has fathered more than 100 children born in the US through American surrogates. His company says "only a little over 100”, but an ex-girlfriend puts the number closer to 300 across several countries. In a 2023 Los Angeles family court hearing, appearing by video from China, Xu told the judge he wanted more than 20 US-born children, specifically boys, "because they're superior to girls," so they could eventually run his company. The judge later denied his parentage petitions for at least a dozen of the children, leaving them in legal limbo: no clear parent, no clear country.

This year, Senators Rick Scott and Tom Cotton sent former Attorney General Pam Bondi a formal letter asking her to investigate. Their concern isn't really about Xu Bo's parenting choices. It's that children in these arrangements are "born on United States soil and granted automatic citizenship" and then, "in most cases," flown to China, raising the possibility of American citizens raised entirely under Chinese state influence who later become eligible for US voting rights and, in theory, security clearances.

The mechanism is citizenship, and it’s currently a legal battlefield.

In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented or temporarily present parents. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court struck it down 6-3. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that children born in the US to parents "unlawfully or temporarily present" are "citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause." Six weeks later, on August 6, Trump signed a new, narrower order targeting the same territory again. The ACLU and the Asian Law Caucus are already suing.

There’s nuance to this topic: birth tourism, where a pregnant woman travels to the US specifically to deliver, is the version that's gotten prosecuted, including a California woman sentenced to 41 months for running a maternity center that helped more than 100 Chinese women give birth on US soil. Surrogacy is the version that routes around that entire risk. The biological mother never leaves China. An American woman carries the pregnancy, delivers on US soil, and the same citizenship outcome lands with none of the travel or visa scrutiny attached to birth tourism.

And American women are the supply.

More than 107 Chinese-owned surrogacy agencies are reportedly operating in Southern California alone, some allegedly tied to Chinese state-owned entities. Chinese clients typically pay US surrogates $50,000 or more, on top of $40,000 to $50,000 in agency fees, for arrangements that often total $150,000-plus. The US has become one of the most attractive places in the world to buy a surrogate pregnancy for one simple reason: American surrogates automatically hand a foreign client something almost no other country's surrogacy market can offer as cleanly, a US passport.

None of this is actually new. It’s just wearing a new country’s flag.

Surrogacy supply has always followed economic desperation, not medical convenience. Ukraine, sunk into poverty by war, now controls roughly a quarter of the global surrogacy market despite having under 1% of the world's population. BioTexCom, the world's largest commercial surrogacy agency, operates there, and its own medical director has said plainly: "all those who work as surrogate mothers do so out of financial hardship."

Foreign clients make up an estimated 95% of demand, and volumes have reportedly climbed back to near pre-war levels even with the fighting ongoing. Before Ukraine, it was Thailand, India, and Nepal, each the world's surrogacy hub in turn, each eventually banning commercial surrogacy once enough exploitation surfaced. The trade didn't stop. It moved to wherever the next economically strained population was.

America has its own domestic version of this pattern, minus the medical procedure, because surrogacy didn't exist yet as a practice. During the Great Depression, Georgia Tann ran the Tennessee Children's Home Society, trafficking an estimated 5,000 children out of desperate, mostly unwed mothers, and made over $500,000 in her final decade alone, worth roughly $5 to $10 million today. Economic collapse has produced a market for other people's children before. It's producing one again, just with better paperwork attached.

Why America. Why now.

I want to be straight about where the evidence actually points, because it's not where I expected. US surrogates skew white and Hispanic, and a 2024 study of 231 of them found they're better paid, better insured, and better educated than their state's average, not the economically desperate profile you'd assume. A separate retrospective study of LA-area gestational carriers found the pool was 52.8% Caucasian, 38.2% Hispanic, and just 3.4% Asian.

The real domestic pattern is military families. Military wives are less than 1% of the US population and somewhere between 15% and 20% of all paid surrogates nationally, climbing to half of all surrogates in some base-heavy regions of Texas, California, and Florida. Recruiters target them for three specific reasons: 90% are underemployed by their own Pentagon's count, their husbands' service pay is comparatively low, and they already carry free healthcare, which erases the buyer's biggest line-item cost. Agencies advertise directly in military publications and cluster their offices around the bases.

It's the same mechanism as the 1980s legal scholars warned about, just aimed at a different vulnerability. Back then, the fear was that surrogacy would become "a means by which wealthy white people can exploit poor people of color." That fear mostly came true abroad, in India, Thailand, and now Ukraine, where poverty and war did the recruiting. In America, the version that actually materialized runs through underemployment. Even the Chinese-client segment of the US market bears this out: reporting on it describes working- and middle-class white surrogates matching with wealthy Chinese intended parents, not women of color.

Note: the surrogacy market still largely operates in a gray zone, so there are few peer-reviewed or traditional media outlets publishing data on the industry. I’ve made an attempt to use the sources that currently exist, but will note that some of them include organizations I don’t historically source.

Billionaires are worried about a birth rate collapse in public, while a smaller number of them are privately solving their own version of the problem by buying access to American women's bodies and American citizenship law at scale. And with the largest IPO boom in history underway, this could become an even bigger part of American life soon.

Next week, we’ll dive into the topic even further — the fertility economy. Fertility is the biggest global force shaping humanity, outside of AI, but it is that exact AI that could be the key to unlocking the number one biological obstacle that has faced women for millennia. (Aldous Huxley’s babies in bottles, I’m looking at you — IYKYK).

Hit reply and tell me: do you think the surrogacy boom is a sign of things to come? I read every single response.

Jenny

P.S. If you think birthright citizenship is a settled legal question, it isn't. Watch what happens to the August 6 executive order. This one isn't done yet.

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