PM Viktor Orbán’s recent interview with Tucker Carlson has garnered quite a bit of attention online. On the social media platform X it has been viewed over 120 million times, and liked over 204,000 times. Among the 10,000 comments left on the post, there is one that particularly stands out.
Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX and the X social platform, who happens to be the world’s richest man, said in praise of Hungary:
‘Very interesting. Hungary is trying hard to address their birth rate problem’.
Low birth rates have been a pet topic of Musk recently, along with other issues such as the dangers of AI research and the protection of free speech. As he has stated multiple times, he fears a ‘population collapse’ would be brought on by the low number of child births, a danger he admittedly thinks is bigger than global warming.
Hungary will be hosting the biannual Budapest Demographic Summit addressing this very issue, along with other issues that may affect families, between 14 and 16 September. The keynote speaker will be Giorgia Meloni, the first female Prime Minister of Italy and mother of one. However, President Katalin Novák of Hungary issued
a very public invitation to an even higher profile person: Elon Musk himself.
Novák wrote ‘We look forward to seeing you in Budapest!’ to Musk, replying to his comment on the Viktor Orbán interview. Musk is yet to respond.
The South African-born eccentric billionaire has no official affiliations with our country, and there is no evidence of his ever visiting it either. In April 2017, a group of young Hungarian engineers organised a campaign over social media, trying to convince him to open up a Tesla ‘gigafactory’, as the company calls their manufacturing plants, in Hungary, to no avail. However, Musk has met the Demographic Summit’s keynote speaker, PM Meloni, before. He visited her in Rome back in June.
Jordan Peterson Chimes In To Praise Hungary’s Family Measures
World-famous Canadian clinical psychologist and philosopher Jordan B. Peterson also joined in the discussion about low birth rates and Hungary. He gave a detailed description of the tax credits the Hungarian government is giving to mothers after their children. Raising the number of child births has always been a top priority of the Orbán administration. As a result, the nation’s fertility rate grew from 1.23 in 2011 to 1.61 in 2021, above the EU average of 1.55, according to Eurostats’ numbers.
Unlike Musk, Dr Peterson has made many appearances in our country. The last such an occasion took place in May of this year, when he gave a public lecture at the Papp László Budapest Sports Arena.
Related articles:
