Yes, Elon should clone himself now

In 20 years, we could have a world with 1000s of geniuses around

Speaking of other science advances we could make right now, human cloning is a good opportunity. Why spend time optimizing embryo selection if we can just take a genome we know is good and make more of them? From a family perspective, it doesn't work so well, as only one 'parent' will be related to the child, but from a human achievement perspective, it makes sense.

Could we do it, technologically? Definitely. There are companies around already who will clone your (dead) pet, and it's the same technology for any mammal. You can clone the pets, dogs, cats, and horses:

And even your ferret:

OK, so we could do it, but would it work? Will we get more successful people this way? Certainly. Success depends on genetic factors in part. We already have clones walking among us, they are called monozygotic twins. The only thing special about monozygotic twins is that they shared the same womb at the same time, so they are the same age too (sharing womb is not important). Reproductive cloning of adult humans would result in time-displaced monozygotic twins.

But is genius or eminence really heritable? Sure. We know some of the psychological causes of eminence, intelligence, personality, including drive, work ethic etc., all of which are highly heritable when studied individually. So since eminence is a composite trait of these, this composite must also be heritable. As far as I know, there's only one study of the heritability of eminence itself:

• Woodley, M. A., Peñaherrera-Aguirre, M., & Sarraf, M. A. (2021). Estimating the Additive Heritability of Historiometric Eminence in a Super-Pedigree Comprised of Four Prominent Families. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 24(4), 191-199.

By merging analytical approaches from the fields of historiometrics and behavior genetics, a social pedigree-based estimate of the heritability of eminence is generated. Eminent individuals are identified using the Pantheon dataset. A single super-pedigree, comprised of four prominent and interrelated families (including the Wedgwood–Darwin, Arnold–Huxley, Keynes-Baha’u’lláh, and Benn-Rutherford pedigrees) is assembled, containing 30 eminent individuals out of 301 in total. Each eminent individual in the super-pedigree is assigned a relative measure of historical eminence (scaled from 1 to 100) with noneminent individuals assigned a score of 0. Utilizing a Bayesian pedigree-based heritability estimation procedure employing an informed prior, an additive heritability of eminence of .507 (95% CI [.434, .578]) was found. The finding that eminence is additively heritable is consistent with expectations from behavior-genetic studies of factors that are thought to underlie extraordinary accomplishment, which indicate that they are substantially additively heritable. Owing to the limited types of intermarriage present in the data, it was not possible to estimate the impact of nonadditive genetic contributions to heritability. Gene-by-environment interactions could not be estimated in the present analysis either; therefore, the finding that eminence is simply a function of additive genetic and nonshared environmental variance should be interpreted cautiously.

The good thing about cloning adults, as opposed to embryos, is that there's really no limit on how many one can make. Only money stands between us having 1 Elon Musk, and having 100+. And Elon Musk has all the money needed for this.

Is it legal? Actually yes. Wikipedia has an overview. Most countries have no laws against human cloning. Note that there's two kinds of cloning:

Therapeutic cloning would involve cloning cells from a human for use in medicine and transplants. It is an active area of research, and is in medical practice over the world. Two common methods of therapeutic cloning that are being researched are somatic-cell nuclear transfer and (more recently) pluripotent stem cell induction.

Reproductive cloning would involve making an entire cloned human, instead of just specific cells or tissues.

We are only interested in reproductive cloning, which is more commonly banned than mere therapeutic cloning (why banned? religious people). Now most western countries have banned reproductive cloning, but not USA. Amazingly, there's no laws against it at the federal level, but some states have made their own. And some haven't, so it is presumed legal. About half of US states have no applicable laws, including Texas, the home of Tesla.

What about international laws? Yes, kinda sorta. The United Nations has adopted the United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning (2005) which reads:

(a) Member States are called upon to adopt all measures necessary to protect adequately human life in the application of life sciences;

(b) Member States are called upon to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life;

(c) Member States are further called upon to adopt the measures necessary to prohibit the application of genetic engineering techniques that may be contrary to human dignity;

(d) Member States are called upon to take measures to prevent the exploitation of women in the application of life sciences;

(e) Member States are also called upon to adopt and implement without delay national legislation to bring into effect paragraphs (a) to (d);

(f) Member States are further called upon, in their financing of medical research, including of life sciences, to take into account the pressing global issues such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, which affect in particular the developing countries.

It's more of a statement of religious feelings than a real law. But in any case, it's a non-binding resolution, so the penalty for violating it is nothing. Thus, as far as I can tell, nothing legally prevents Elon or anyone else from doing this. Surely, he can find many women who are willing to bear his clones, even for free. What are we waiting for? What is he waiting for? In fact, the harder question is: Why has no one done this already?