Birthrates in much of the developed world are at record lows, but there’s one demographic group that’s exploring new frontiers of fertility: ultrawealthy men. Deploying nearly limitless resources, a small number of them are reproducing at such an extraordinary scale and pace that they’re exploding previous notions of what a family is. At a moment when so many people say they feel priced out of having even one child, these adventures in prolific fatherhood are emerging as a stark example of inequality made flesh.

Numerous reports have landed in recent years about men using reproductive technology to produce dozens of offspring. The billionaire developer Stefan Soloviev has 22 children, some conceived through clinical methods. Pavel Durov, the billionaire Russian founder of the messaging platform Telegram, said his sperm donations had produced over 100 children. The disgraced American insurance tycoon Greg Lindberg undertook what he called a “baby project” that reportedly involved duping models into donating their eggs to him as he expanded his brood to at least 12, and the even more disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein told a scientist that he wanted to spread his DNA by impregnating as many as 20 surrogates at a time with his sperm. Some very rich Chinese men, The Wall Street Journal reported, have sought the assistance of American surrogacy agencies to sire staggering numbers of children: The founder of one network of fertility clinics said that one of these men expressed a desire to have more than 200 children at once. According to the South China Morning Post, the ex-partner of Xu Bo, another Chinese businessman, publicly accused him of having at least 300 children, a claim he has denied.

And, of course, there is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. With a mere 14 known children by four women, his output may seem tame by comparison with some megafathers, but his influence is larger than the sum of his offspring. He was cited as a role model when he was a paltry megabillionaire. Now that he has entered the realm of the trillionaire, his actions are likely to reverberate even more. He is reported to have told one of his children’s mothers he wants to use surrogates to “reach legion level.” In the meantime, he has goaded the competition. In response to a post about Mr. Durov notching triple-digit offspring, Mr. Musk replied, “‘Rookie numbers lmao’ — Genghis Khan,” a nod to the Mongol leader’s supposed millions of descendants.

What drives these men to reproduce at an industrial scale? Mr. Musk’s reference to Genghis Khan holds one clue. Each man presumably has his unique motivations, and the instinct to donate your sperm far and wide may differ from the desire to create a compound full of your progeny and their mothers, but they seem united in one thing: Like kings of earlier eras who claimed divine lineage, many of these men hold their own bloodlines in exalted regard. Mr. Musk, who in 2021 changed his job title at Tesla to “technoking,” has said he wants smart people — or even just rich people, according to a report in Business Insider — to have more children. One of the mothers of his offspring, an executive in his business, told his biographer that he encouraged her to have kids and suggested he be her sperm donor.

Mr. Epstein was reportedly inspired by the short-lived Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that was reputed to have Nobel laureates among its donors. Mr. Durov, who frequently posts shirtless images of his chiseled upper body on social media, said his sperm was “high-quality donor material.” These men appear to view distributing their DNA as a gift to humankind, a philanthropic act of genetic optimization that will benefit generations to come.

Monarchs also saw children as tools, proof of their legitimacy and means by which to forge alliances through marriage. Today’s most productive patriarchs speak of their children in similarly instrumental terms — sons to be the heirs to their business empires, daughters to be strategically married off to powerful men, babies to be the siblings the father never had or just bodies to stave off population collapse.

This particular story would not have been possible, however, in some long-ago era of crowns and castles. Kings had consorts and concubines aplenty, but they were limited by biological constraints. Technokings, on the other hand, can use assisted reproductive technologies and multiple simultaneous surrogates to create webs of siblings born within months of one another.

In vitro fertilization doesn’t just allow one man to produce multiple pregnancies in parallel; it allows him to exercise a measure of control over their outcomes, such as specifying a baby’s sex or even selecting an embryo based on its risk of disease — quality control, you might say, for a human factory. One egg donor participating in Mr. Lindberg’s baby project reported that its patron told her he “wanted 12 blond-haired, blue-eyed boys.” Mr. Epstein’s emails reveal a similar obsession with blue eyes. The Information reported that Mr. Musk has used polygenic embryo screening, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars and purports to enable parents to choose embryos based on desired genetic profiles.

Most of the reproductive technologies these men are using have been around for a few decades. What’s new is the impulse to use them in such bizarrely self-glorifying ways while buying one’s way out of any inconvenient constraints that other clients might encounter. It is a distinctive product of this era in which the wealthiest few can use essentially limitless wealth to buy essentially limitless power. I’ve spoken to middle-class fertility patients who borrow money or apply to charities to cover the cost of I.V.F. to have just one desperately wanted child. Men this rich easily produce scores of them, even at a price of $200,000 or more for surrogacy and donor eggs, and can then casually outsource the demands of bringing them up.

The capacity to alchemize money and sperm in this manner has turned an ordinary and beautiful event, the creation of a child, into a kind of acquisition frenzy. It has also produced a windfall for the businesses willing to rev up production and customize children to their clients’ specifications. The owner of one U.S. surrogacy agency told The Journal he had helped to “fill an order” for 100 babies for a wealthy Chinese client. Mr. Durov has covered the cost of I.V.F. for Russian women at a Moscow fertility clinic that stores his sperm. Two American fertility clinics, one in Los Angeles and one in Chicago, seemed happy to help Mr. Lindberg execute his baby project, together treating at least 19 of his egg donors and surrogates.

Engaging with the fertility industry, whether as patients or clients, can turn out very differently for women, especially those who lack the same extravagant means. A Times investigation found that Thai women lured to Georgia to be surrogates might have had their eggs extracted without their consent. Here in this country, a surrogate who had a stillbirth was doxxed and sued by the wealthy woman who had hired her, according to reporting in Wired.

Then there are the children. The New Yorker recently detailed disturbing allegations of child abuse and neglect by a Los Angeles-based couple who had commissioned roughly two dozen babies from surrogates.

These billionaire megafathers, by contrast, have the cultural and political winds at their backs. Tech-bro philosophers have mounted sophisticated-sounding defenses of aristocratic rule, eugenics and selective breeding, providing intellectual cover or even moral justification for the billionaires’ unorthodox paternal pursuits. And leaders around the world have gone to sometimes comical lengths to encourage their citizens to have more children.

All of this suggests it is unlikely that wealthy men will face any meaningful restrictions on how they can use assisted reproductive technologies. Nor is it clear what accountability looks like in regards to the children who have been born, some of whom have been placed in foster care. Mr. Lindberg kept his baby project going even while locked up on a bribery conviction, apparently with little thought to the well-being of the infants who were soon to be born. “How are we going to pay for the nannies, etc. for these babies when they get here?” one of his employees asked a colleague, Bloomberg reported.

When Mr. Xu, the man whose ex-partner accused him of having 300 children, spoke via videoconference with an American family court judge in the summer of 2023, he had not even bothered to meet several of his children. They were being raised by nannies in Irvine, Calif., while they waited for the documents to travel to China. He explained to the judge, who was evaluating a number of surrogacy petitions in his name, that work had been busy. (You know how it is.) There is little care, nurturing or love in these stories; there is mostly head count and optimization.

An overwhelming majority of people who avail themselves of fertility services do so without abusing them. It is apparently only a few men of extreme wealth who are using them in ways that were never intended, to build not families but legions of bespoke children. The fertility sector could surely benefit from more oversight, but the richest among us will always have ways to circumvent laws that don’t suit them. We should also focus on reining in the extraordinary inequality that has given rise to a kingly class of men so powerful, they believe they can remake the world in their genetic image.