The Tesla babies program and my 3am scrolling spiral

It was 3:42 am on a Tuesday, and I was pinned beneath Twin A, who was rhythmically exhaling sour milk vapour directly into my collarbone. The house was locked in that heavy, unnatural silence that only exists just before a toddler realizes they've lost their dummy. I was doing what I always do in these liminal hours of sheer survival: scrolling through my phone with the brightness turned down so low I was essentially reading by braille.

My phone buzzed against my leg. A text from my wife in the next room (we text because speaking aloud risks waking Twin B, and also because speaking requires air we simply don't have).

babi is crying again, need the Calpol

A pause. A three-minute delay while I tried to extricate my left arm from under a sleeping two-year-old. Then another text arrived.

babie*

I stared at the screen. We have actual babies, I typed back with my thumb. Are you seriously correcting a typo at four in the morning?

It's French, came the immediate reply. We're entering the era of la babie. It sounds much more expensive this way.

It was a fair point. Everything about them was staggeringly expensive, which brought me sharply back to the article glowing on my screen: a deeply enthusiastic deep-dive into the so-called Tesla Babies Program. Apparently, while I was sitting in a dark London flat covered in someone else's bodily fluids, corporate America had decided to start throwing tens of thousands of dollars at people to reproduce.

Reading about billionaires in the dark

If you haven't stumbled across this particular piece of corporate utopianism, the Tesla program is essentially a massive bundle of family planning benefits designed to keep employees from fleeing the tech sector the moment they decide to procreate. Driven at least in part by Elon Musk's public, slightly terrifying obsession with global underpopulation—a concept I find utterly hilarious given I currently feel like my two-bedroom flat is suffering from a catastrophic overpopulation of toddlers—the company is throwing serious cash at fertility.

We're talking about up to $40,000 in reimbursement for IVF, fertility treatments, and adoption. They've partnered with sleek, aggressively modern fertility clinics with names like Kindbody, which sound less like medical facilities and more like expensive athleisure brands. They give you sixteen weeks of paid leave.

Sixteen weeks. I let that roll around in my sleep-deprived brain for a moment. When my wife was pregnant with the twins, I spent three weeks trying to decipher my former employer's paternity policy, which was buried so deep in the HR intranet I felt like Indiana Jones searching for the lost ark, only to discover I was entitled to two weeks of statutory pay, which wouldn't even cover our monthly coffee budget, let alone the sheer volume of nappies required by two humans operating in tandem.

I vaguely remember reading—possibly in a panicked fever dream or maybe a WHO pamphlet handed to us in a windowless NHS waiting room—that infertility is officially classified as a disease of the reproductive system. Our GP, a lovely woman who always looked exactly as tired as we felt, suggested that the sheer financial toxicity of paying for IVF out of pocket probably undoes half the clinical benefits of the treatment itself, though she framed it with a bit more medical diplomacy. The idea that an employer would just hand you forty grand to take the edge off that burden is staggering. It's brilliant, obviously, but it does carry the faint, dystopian scent of golden handcuffs. What happens if you try to quit? Do they repossess the child? It feels like they might.

An asymmetrical rant about the childcare cliff

But the fertility money isn't even the part that made me want to throw my phone across the room. No, the truly wild part of the Tesla program is the childcare integration. They're apparently exploring on-site childcare facilities right there in the factories and offices.

Let me tell you about the childcare cliff in London, because it's not a cliff. A cliff implies a sudden drop. The UK childcare system is more of a slow, grinding descent into financial ruin while being repeatedly punched in the face by bureaucracy. To get a nursery spot for twins in our postcode, you essentially have to register them when they're just a theoretical twinkle in your heavily-mortgaged eye. You walk into these places, and they smell vaguely of bleach and mashed banana, and the manager looks you dead in the eye and tells you that for the privilege of keeping your children alive between the hours of 8am and 6pm, they'll require your entire post-tax salary and perhaps a kidney.

The logistical gymnastics required to easily leave the house and go to a job to earn the money to pay for the place that watches your children while you're at the job is mind-bending. You find yourself having hushed, frantic conversations in the kitchen at midnight about whether it makes more financial sense for one of you to just quit your career and become a full-time domestic manager, entirely throwing away a decade of professional progression because the government thinks childcare is a luxury rather than basic economic infrastructure. The sheer relief of walking into your office building, handing your child to an on-site professional, and going up the lift to your desk without having to negotiate the Central line with a double buggy... it sounds like science fiction. It sounds completely mythical.

Oh, and they also offer subsidised egg freezing, which I suppose is quite handy if your ultimate life goal is to spend your entire fertile window living in a gigafactory.

Office survival and other mythical concepts

Eventually, of course, the leave ends. Whether you got a luxurious American corporate sixteen weeks or whatever cobbled-together mess you managed to negotiate here, you've to go back to work. I remember the absolute terror of trying to transition the twins from being constantly attached to us to being functional little independent entities.

I was so desperate to buy myself four minutes of unbroken time to email my manager about my return dates that I frantically unboxed the Rainbow Play Gym Set with one hand while holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder. I was hoping the soothing natural wood and those little hanging elephants would distract Twin B long enough for me to sound like a competent professional. It's actually quite nice, as far as these things go. It's minimalist, it doesn't assault your retinas with neon flashing lights or play electronic tunes that make you want to walk into the sea, and it successfully kept her from trying to eat the skirting board for exactly twelve minutes. Twelve minutes is a lifetime in toddler currency.

If you're currently stress-scrolling through your own company's pathetic excuse for a maternity policy and need a distraction that won't raise your blood pressure, you could always take a cynical scroll through Kianao's baby essentials while you figure out how to gently threaten HR.

But returning to work also means the physical logistics of keeping these tiny humans clothed and fed while you're fundamentally losing your mind. There's this whole cottage industry of "return to work" clothing for babies, which is mostly just marketing nonsense. We bought the Sleeveless Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit at some point because a very intense woman at a playgroup told my wife that non-organic cotton was basically poison. I view claims like that with deep, British suspicion. I'll say, however, that they're... fine. They're perfectly adequate. They catch copious amounts of drool, they stretch over a squirming baby's head without causing a meltdown, and they go through the wash without shrinking into an outfit fit only for a small dog. They're a solid, unpretentious layer, which is honestly all you really want at 6am when you're trying to locate your work pass.

What you actually need, however, and I mean this with the fire of a thousand suns, is the Panda Teether. When Twin A decided that cutting four teeth simultaneously while I was trying to transition back to freelance journalism was a brilliant life choice, she became entirely feral. I found her trying to gnaw on the corner of my laptop screen while I was attempting to write a pitch. I shoved this little silicone panda at her in a moment of pure panic, and the silence that followed was religious. It has these little bamboo-textured bumps that apparently hit the exact nerve center of infantile rage. It doesn't look like much, but it's brilliant. We own three of them. I keep one in my coat pocket at all times, like a protective talisman against public meltdowns.

What to do when your company offers you nothing

I'm fairly certain the American Academy of Pediatrics says that paid leave and supportive benefits actively prevent postpartum depression, though honestly, I didn't need a medical journal to tell me that not being forced to answer emails while actively bleeding or hallucinating from sleep deprivation would be beneficial for mental health.

There's this prevailing internet wisdom that if your company lacks these perks, you should meticulously audit your HR portal for hidden stipends, aggressively form an Employee Resource Group to lobby management, and seamlessly secure a nanny share by networking at the local park—which is all terribly sensible advice that completely ignores the reality of being too nauseous or exhausted to even remember your own laptop password. You can't out-girlboss a systemic lack of childcare infrastructure. If you happen to be staring at your company's intranet right now trying to figure out if they'll give you a single hour off for an ultrasound, you might want to quietly drop a link to these massive tech sector programs in your HR Slack channel just to watch the panic set in, rather than accepting the standard 'here's a ten-pound voucher' and retreating into the night.

We shouldn't have to work for a man trying to colonize Mars just to get decent parental support. We shouldn't have to rely on the whims of corporate billionaires to decide whether we can afford to freeze our eggs or put our children in a safe room with blocks while we answer emails. But until the rest of the world catches up to the sheer cost of raising humans, we're all just going to be sitting in the dark at 3am, scrolling on our phones, and dreaming of an on-site nursery.

Before you dive into my entirely unqualified, highly cynical answers to your corporate benefit questions below, you might want to grab some actual, tangible relief for the immediate problem. Stock up on survival gear at Kianao's teething collection before you attempt to decipher your workplace pension scheme.

Frequently Asked Questions (From a dad who has read too much at 3am)

What actually is the deal with tech company baby programs?

Honestly, it's an arms race for talent wrapped in a PR campaign. Companies like Tesla, Apple, and Google realised that it's vastly cheaper to pay forty grand for your IVF and give you an on-site creche than it's to replace you when you inevitably burn out and quit because you can't afford local childcare. They wrap it in language about 'supporting families,' but it's really about keeping your brain focused on their profits rather than your nursery bills. It's incredibly good, and frankly, if someone offered me that deal right now, I'd probably take it in a heartbeat.

Do I've to work for a billionaire to get IVF covered?

In the US, usually yes, or at least a massive corporation with a progressive HR department, because the healthcare system over there's a lawless wasteland. Here in the UK, we theoretically have the NHS, but our GP quietly admitted the waitlists are so long you might age out of the brackets before you even see a consultant. Some forward-thinking British companies are starting to offer fertility loans or stipends via platforms like Carrot, but it's still treated as a bizarre luxury perk rather than basic medical care.

How do you bring up fertility benefits with a boss who still uses a fax machine?

With extreme caution and heavily documented industry comparisons. You don't walk in and demand they pay for your egg freezing. You send an email framing it as a 'retention strategy' and point out that competitors are offering these packages to poach top talent. Management doesn't care about your family planning journey, but they care deeply about losing their best mid-level managers to a tech startup. Speak to them in the language of money.

Is 16 weeks of maternity leave honestly enough?

Our GP mumbled something about 16 weeks being the absolute bare minimum for preventing total maternal burnout, but let's be entirely honest: at 16 weeks, your baby is still basically a loudly screaming potato that requires 24/7 surveillance. It's better than the appalling lack of leave in most of America, but compared to the Scandanavians—who get something like a year to wander through pine forests bonding with their infants—16 weeks is a cruel joke. You take what you can get, but don't let them convince you it's a generous gift.

Does organic baby clothing really matter?

I mean, probably? The people who sell it'll tell you that regular cotton is bathed in toxic chemicals that will ruin your child's life. I'm far too tired to verify the agricultural science behind this, but I do know that babies have incredibly sensitive, constantly rash-prone skin. If you can afford it, organic cotton is softer and arguably less likely to trigger whatever random bout of eczema your child has decided to develop this week. But if your baby is wearing a polyester onesie from a supermarket, they're also going to be absolutely fine.