Elon Musk.
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Elon Musk says it’s “super concerning” that smart youths aren’t having more sex.
He was responding to a tweet about high IQ youths not having as much sex as average IQ youths.
The tweet’s content can be traced back to a paper published in 2000, titled: “Smart teens don’t have sex.”
Elon Musk is concerned about the sex lives of smart teenage boys.
On Monday night, the Twitter CEO replied to a tweet from a user named Bronwyn Williams. Williams referenced research that said youths with IQs over 130 are “3-5 times less likely” to have had sex than those with average IQs.
“Boys with an IQ that would qualify for intellectual disability (60) were still more likely to have had sex than those with a very high IQ (130),” Williams tweeted, adding that this “does not bode well for humanity.”
“Super concerning,” Musk tweeted in response.
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2023
Williams’ tweet references a research paper published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2000, titled “Smart teens don’t have sex (or kiss much either).”
The study tracked 12,000 adolescents in the US between the 7th and 12th grades to try to determine the link between intelligence and sexual activity.
The study found that adolescents on the upper end of the intelligence distribution were less likely to have sex than their peers. But teens on the lower end of the intelligence distribution were also less likely to be sexually active than other people their age, the study found. Meanwhile, those with higher intelligence scores were also found to be more likely to have sexual relationships later in life.
Carolyn Halpern, a professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and of the study’s researchers, told WebMD in 2000 that more intelligent teens are “probably thinking about their educational and occupational goals and the possible negative consequences of early sexual activity.”
It’s worth noting that the research was published 23 years ago. A study published in 2021 in the academic journal “Archives of Sexual Behavior” found that from 2009 to 2018, people, be they teenagers or adults, have been having less sex all around.
Musk is known to frequently tweet about population collapse, claiming that humans need to increase fertility rates immediately to avoid catastrophic consequences.
Musk did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.