Elon Musk doubled down on his theory that world population is headed for collapse

REUTERS/Mike Blake

Elon Musk believes the human population is headed for decline.

• Elon Musk tweeted on Friday, doubling down on his theory that the global population will be in decline by 2050.
• The Tesla and SpaceX CEO first backed the theory in 2017 in response to a New Scientist article about a "population bomb."
• The idea isn't universally accepted, with the UN predicting that the human population will grow to 9.3 billion by 2050.
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Elon Musk is still worried about the human population.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted on Friday, doubling down on a theory he's backed in the past - that the human population is headed for implosion.

Responding to a tweet, which projected the global population to grow by roughly 1.6 billion by 2050, Musk said the real problem facing humanity is an "aging [sic] and declining world population."

Musk cites Jørgen Randers, a Norwegian academic who in his 2012 book "2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years" argued that the human population will start dwindling from around 2040.

Musk drew attention to the prospect of the human population peaking two years ago, when he pointed to a New Scientist article about a "population bomb" going off by 2076. "The world's population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care," Musk tweeted in 2017.

The idea is not universally accepted. The 2019 UN World Population Prospects Report estimated that the Earth's population could reach 9.7 billion in 2050. However, it did also conclude the world's population is growing at a slowing rate, and noted the "unprecedented ageing of the world's population."

Musk thinks that the world's population will begin to look like an inverted pyramid over the next three decades. "Demographics, stratified by age, will look like an upside down pyramid with many old people & fewer young," he tweeted on Friday morning.