One egg, 3.5 micrograms. $500 million in cash, 2.5 tons.
This is the first sentence written by a big shot in a certain circle in his 6,000-word article "My Girlfriend is Da Tiantian", which went viral on the internet. Da Tiantian called him from a hotel in Montage Laguna Beach, Los Angeles, wanting the latter and mortgaging the former. DY's child is expected to be born in 2027 and will be a horse if born early. When she arrived at the clinic, she said that without 50 million, she would not have an abortion.
He later said in an interview that he asked AI whether he should give her the money, and the AI replied, "You can't give her the $50 million." A billionaire in his 90s, worth tens of billions of dollars, needs to ask AI when making a decision worth tens of millions of dollars. It's unclear whether this is absurd or reasonable.
But what really gave me pause was another number.
Xu, the founder of a certain network, is rumored to have fathered more than 100 children. The company's official microblog once voluntarily disclosed this matter, attaching a photo showing the children seated in rows in a hall-like venue, with nannies caring for them on both sides. The company also calculated that each child's annual upbringing cost is approximately 24,000 to 29,000 yuan.
More than 100 children, with annual expenses of over 2 million yuan just for raising them. For a billionaire with a net worth of 23 billion yuan, this is probably comparable to an ordinary person raising a tank of goldfish.
There's also the seemingly time-traveling Elon Musk, who as of 2026 has had 14 children with four women. Recently, a female executive at Neuralink had another child with him. He openly advocates for "having more children to address the population crisis" and is practicing what he preaches, earning him the modern title of "sowing machine".
It suddenly occurs to me that when reading historical books, one of the things that ancient emperors worried about the most was their offspring. Qin Shi Huang longed for a son until his death, Han Wu Emperor killed many people in his later years to establish a successor, and Tang Xuanzong had dozens of children but still continued to have more. For them, having many children was not a choice, but a political task - the throne needed someone to inherit, and their bloodline needed to be passed down continuously.
But what do today's wealthy need to inherit?
Boss Xu's 100-plus children were mostly born through American surrogacy. Musk's 14 children were largely conceived via IVF. The drama between Boss Sun and Sweetie hinged on a standoff: one egg not yet retrieved, and 2.5 tons of cash.
For them, childbirth has become an assembly line. Egg donors are selected for advanced degrees and physical attractiveness, embryos are cultivated with their own sperm, and surrogates are contracted for batch production. Children are designed, ordered, and delivered like bespoke products.
There's a breakfast stall near the office run by a woman in her mid-forties. A while back, I stopped by for breakfast and we chatted briefly. She told me she has to get up at four every morning to knead dough. She has two kids—the older one just got into a vocational college, and the younger one is still in middle school. During our conversation, she said her biggest wish in life is that her children end up better off than she is, and don't have to work themselves to the bone from dawn to dusk the way she does.
She may never know that somewhere on this planet, someone traded 2.5 tons of cash for a 3.5-microgram egg. Someone has fathered more than 100 children yet couldn't name them all if asked. Someone treats fertility as an asset allocation strategy, and offspring as the compounding interest of their genes.
Xu's company official WeChat account once described him as a "fusion of Duan Zhixing and Guo Jing". Duan Zhixing was amorous, while Guo Jing was kind and honest, so how can these two be combined, and has he been transported to the present through AI fusion or something? It's hard to understand. But one thing is certain - Duan Zhixing recognized all of his children, while Guo Jing personally taught his children martial arts.
Those children who were brought to this world in batches, who will teach them martial arts?
Sun Dasheng wrote in a long article that he used an old Lenovo IBM machine in his Peking University dormitory to find a photo of Da Tian Tian on the campus network and saved it. Every time he changed devices, he would transfer the photo over. Nineteen years later, he finally met her.
The story sounds quite romantic, but the ending is a negotiation over a 3.5-microgram egg and 2.5 tons of cash.
The dream of emperorship, when all is said and done, is just an illusion bought with money, one that says "my bloodline will live on." But what's the point of leaving a bloodline behind, anyway? Qin Shi Huang's bloodline only lasted for two generations before it was cut off. The sons of Han Wu Di killed each other off until only one was left. Most of the children born to those ancient emperors didn't even leave behind a name in the historical records.
Ultimately, they don't want children, they want to "win". They want to draw more cards at the genetic poker table and have chips to negotiate with when death arrives. But the most ironic thing about this is - when you turn having children into a precisely calculated investment, you've already lost.
Children are never assets, they are debts of fate. The more you try to use money to control all the variables, the more fate will find a gap you can't calculate and take its due, with interest.
The breakfast stall owner's two children may never ride a private plane or stay in a seaside hotel that costs $1 million a month. But at least they know what time their mother gets up every day, how many scars are on her hands, and that when a bowl of hot bean paste is placed in front of them, it comes with an unspoken "I love you".
And what about those children who are mass-produced, will they be grateful for their birth when they grow up, and will they acknowledge their biological father, not necessarily.