Patrick Bet-David says raising a kid requires exactly 500 five-minute conversations.

The latest status symbol for the ultra-wealthy is not a superyacht. It is a small army of biological children you will probably never meet. A growing cohort of tech billionaires has decided that combating the global decline in birth rates requires them to spread their personal DNA as widely as possible. Pavel Durov claims to have fathered over 100 children through sperm donation. Elon Musk is reportedly aiming for a legion of offspring. The internet calls it “kidmaxing.” Patrick Bet-David calls it a delusion.

On a recent episode of the PBD Podcast, the host took aim at the idea that extreme wealth and artificial reproduction can bypass the actual mechanics of fatherhood. Throwing millions of dollars at surrogacy agencies to manufacture a bloodline is easy. Turning those genetics into a functional human being requires a highly specific, highly tedious input.

Raising a kid is about 500 5-minute conversations, not about one or one weekend spending time with them or, you know, five weekends spending time with them. No, it’s about 500 5-minute conversations that they want to have with Daddy while they’re going through different issues in their lives.

This is a remarkably sharp metric. Tech executives view reproduction as a scaling problem. Bet-David argues it is an unscalable relationship built entirely on high-frequency, low-duration friction. You cannot outsource a five-minute conversation about a schoolyard fight to a nanny. You cannot buy character development at a sperm bank.

The Genghis Khan Complex

The justification for kidmaxing usually rests on a bizarre strain of biological narcissism. These men believe their genetic code is simply too valuable to limit to a traditional family unit. Bet-David acknowledges the historical precedent, noting that world leaders have always tried to spread their heritage. But he refuses to frame the modern iteration as a public good.

I think if you’re going to have kids, make them yours. You and your wife, raise them, you know, build great citizens out of them, build great people out of them.

The crew around the podcast table points out the obvious flaw in the billionaire master plan. Dropping 100 children into the world with a trust fund and no father does not create a society of elite innovators. It creates a massive demographic of therapy patients. As co-host Vincent Oshana notes, wealthy kids raised without boundaries or parental presence usually devolve into delinquents.

The Pro-Natalist Contradiction

Despite defining parenting as active, daily engagement, Bet-David is still deeply anxious about the collapsing global birth rate. This anxiety forces him into a strange hypothetical corner. He cannot help but admire the sheer deployment of capital involved in mass surrogacy. Halfway through his defense of traditional fatherhood, he abruptly stops to play devil’s advocate against his own rule.

You got one guy who’s a billionaire who is willing to put his resources, IVF, whatever it is, and have 100-plus kids or a guy who’s a billionaire and says, “I don’t want to have any kids.” Which one is a net positive to society?

It is a wild question to ask right after proving that an absentee father is essentially useless. The choice between a childless billionaire and a billionaire who manufactures a hundred fatherless children is bleak. If fatherhood truly requires 500 conversations to yield a decent adult, then the billionaire mass-producing kids is not saving society. He is just giving it 100 new problems to solve.