OK, let's stick with modern examples. We already had Warren Buffett. Some very rich tech people: Bill Gates, 3 children; Larry Ellison, 2 children; Jeff Bezos,

OK, let's stick with modern examples. We already had Warren Buffett. Some very rich tech people: Bill Gates, 3 children; Larry Ellison, 2 children; Jeff Bezos, 4 children; Mark Zuckerberg, 2 children. (I just picked some rich tech people and checked whether they had children; no deliberate cherry-picking here.) The most recent Nobel prize in physics went to Jim Peebles (3 children), Michel Mayor (3 children), and Didier Queloz (haven't been able to find out, so maybe none?). I'm not going to spend ages looking up stats for every area of human achievement, and maybe it turns out that all these people had children after achieving success (lots of us non-outliers, after all, wait to have children until we're reasonably secure financially), but at any rate it certainly doesn't seem as if highly successful people are unusually likely not to have children at all.