Remember when Elon Musk challenged Vladimir Putin to physical combat and Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight? Neither of those brawls took place for various reasons. Not least, I suspect, because Musk is just self-aware enough to know that he would not emerge with his dignity, or his spine, intact. However, if the richest man in the world is still casting around for a way to publicly demonstrate his virility, I think I’ve hit on the perfect way: sperm racing.
This isn’t some below-the-belt insult. Sperm racing is an emerging “thing” among tech types now. A teenage entrepreneur called Eric Zhu came up with the idea, and went viral with his first sperm race in April. That initial race was rudimentary: college students gave sperm samples to be analysed and the results were turned into an animated race that visualised the fastest offerings.
Since then, things have got more sophisticated: the company has developed a real-time race mechanism. According to the San Francisco Standard, investors have valued Sperm Racing at $75m and it recently got $10m in seed funding. Good for Zhu, but imagine being a teenage female founder asking for investment in an Ovulation Olympics; you’d get laughed out of the room. That’s if you were even let in the room: wholly women-led companies in the US got just 1% of venture capital funding in 2024.
While sperm racing started off as a joke, it’s now being presented as a health initiative. “Male fertility is declining. Like, a lot,” the company manifesto says. “Sperm racing isn’t just about racing sperm (although, let’s be honest, that’s hilarious). It’s about turning health into a competition. It’s about making male fertility something people actually want to talk about, track and improve.” The company is also hawking a supplement called Sperm Worms.
In many ways, sperm racing is ingenious. Fertility is often thought of as a women’s issue; this helps reframe sperm motility (not exactly a dinner-table conversation) in an engaging way. Getting young men to think more deeply about their reproductive health is great. But “turning health into a competition”? Big yikes. Does that mean anyone who isn’t in perfect health is a loser? Because that’s sure what it sounds like.
Still, what more do you expect from tech bros? Sperm racing reflects three trends dominating Silicon Valley: a fixation on traditional masculinity; an obsession with treating your body like a machine that can be constantly optimised; and an increased interest in fertility that overlaps with a worrying resurgence in eugenics.
You can quite literally see Silicon Valley conforming to more rigid ideas of masculinity over the years. Once, the stereotype of a tech bro was a sweet-looking dork with zero fashion sense and nonexistent biceps. Just Google Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk in 2000, or Mark Zuckerberg in 2010. (And do it quick, before they scrub all evidence from the internet.) As technology companies amassed wealth and power, however, there was a vibe shift. Founders started bulking up and doing mixed martial arts. Zuckerberg, who once paid lip service to diversity, started lamenting the lack of “masculine energy” in corporate culture. And, in parallel with a broader cultural interest in testosterone that manifested in people such as Tucker Carlson promoting testicle tanning and podcasters like Andrew Huberman giving tips on the best testosterone-related supplement stacks, one founder started hosting “T Parties”, where men got together to test and compare their testosterone levels.
Concurrently, pronatalism in Silicon Valley is rising, and fertility technology is booming. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – except a lot of the big bucks being funnelled into fertility don’t seem to be going towards solving macro problems such as reducing air pollution or microplastics, both of which have been linked to infertility, but rather to flashy ideas such as sperm races or finding ways to help the well-off produce uber-optimised children. A number of controversial embryo-testing startups have offered to help parents select a future child with the best possible genes, based on “desirable traits” and genetic predictions of intelligence.
Anyway, problematic or not, expect to see more of this: Zhu has reportedly partnered with a company called Total Frat Move to run sperm races at colleges. I hope that one of the professors there can take a few minutes to explain that the idea of sperm scrambling to get to a waiting egg is something of a macho myth. Research shows the egg actually has the final say on which sperm fertilises it. Which may be a hard nut for some of these boys to crack.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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