Elon Musk’s ‘Japan will cease to exist’ tweet provokes anger

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweet on Japan’s low birth rate on Monday triggered a flood of sarcasm and anger as the billionaire suggested that the island nation will “eventually cease to exist”. 

Reacting to a report which said Japan’s population fell by a record 644,000 to 125.5 million in 2021, Musk tweeted: “At risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. This would be a great loss for the world.” 

“What is even the point of tweeting this?” Tobias Harris, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress wrote in response adding that “the anxieties surrounding Japan’s demographic future is not that ‘Japan will eventually cease to exist’ but rather the profound social dislocations that are occurring as a result of the decline to a lower population level.”