Ever since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, everyone has heard a lot more from Elon Musk. Just recently he made fun of Justin Trudeau, posted about war, and shared some “helpful” advice for “stopping fires” (I didn’t realize he was a firefighter in his spare time, but what do I know?) There’s something else he has talked about: C-sections.
Musk may have 10 kids, but considering the fact that he said “Right now there’s not much I can do” when Grimes took care of their newborn, he’s got some strange ideas about parenthood. And, as it turns out, he has a lot to say about babies born via C-section.
What did Elon Musk say about C-sections?
Musk posted on X in early January 2024 that “heavy use of c-sections allows for a larger brain, as brain size has historically been limited by birth canal diameter.” Is he arguing that those born via c-section are smarter because they have “a larger brain?” That’s how some have interpreted it, as proven by several comments in a Reddit thread. One user wrote, “That’s…not how biology works.”
However, Musk might have been… kind of… right. (Those are hard words to write.) One Redditor explained, “C-sections don’t make babies’ heads bigger, they allow bigger headed babies to be born.” There are a few scenarios when a C-section is necessary. According to John Hopkins Medicine, that happens when the baby is big, which would make a vaginal delivery difficult or impossible.
He’s mostly wrong, though, because no one has ever said that babies born vaginally have smaller brains than those born via C-section. Also, there are other reasons why someone would need one, from a twin pregnancy to complications due to pre-eclampsia or gestational diabetes to the baby’s heart rate declining. Sometimes small babies are born this way, too.
Is Musk saying that no babies with big heads/brains are born vaginally? Who even knows? The more I read this quote, the more my eyes glaze over. But if that’s what he meant, there are some studies that seem to suggest the opposite. In Oct. 2024, a paper was published in Scientific Reports that says “Cesarean birth is associated with lower motor and language development scores during early childhood.” I’m not a scientist, but can anyone really say that babies born via C-section grow up and have worse motor and language skills than others? In 2012, though, a Yale School of Medicine study looked at mice born through a C-section or naturally, and concluded that vaginal births lead to babies whose brains have certain proteins. Tamas Horvath explained the “potentially critical role of UCP2 in the proper development of brain circuits and related behaviors.”
Perhaps Kara Swisher, who wrote Burn Book, said it best. She explained on The View, “you don’t hear Tim Cook going on about Ukraine or cesareans like Elon Musk just did. And I had a cesarean, so I don’t want to hear his opinion about it.”
Well, as it turns out, Grimes did have a C-section… and Musk responded poorly. According to People, Walter Isaacson wrote in a Musk biography that Musk not only took a picture while Grimes was having the surgery done but messaged their friends and family members, too. Grimes said, “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset.” Until Musk has major surgery (perhaps after a long induction, which many often have before their C-section) and then has to recover while going through the terrifying experience of keeping a newborn alive, maybe he should leave the C-section talk to Grimes and everyone else who has had one.