Over the weekend, Elon Musk publicly challenged anybody to “cite a single name of someone who died” as a result of him gutting USAID last year during the early weeks of the second Trump administration — a “death sentence for an estimated 4.5 million children around the world,” according to representative Ro Khanna (D-CA).
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof valiantly took him up on the offer, painstakingly listing the identities of specific children and even an infant who had died in Liberia and South Sudan.
“I could go on and on,” Kristof wrote. “In almost every village you go to in South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone or other countries I reported in, you find people dying because of aid cuts.”
Musk didn’t take kindly to the journalist doing exactly what he’d asked, melting down in an expletive-laden tweet storm on Monday.
“Kristof is utterly evil,” a fuming Musk wrote, without offering up any evidence.
“Kristof is lying through his teeth,” he added scathingly in a separate response.
“Nothing that Kristoff [sic] has said is true,” the richest man in the world tweeted. “He is an utter piece of s*** and liar.”
Musk kept repeating himself in variations of the same messages, which doesn’t seem healthy.
“You’re an utter piece of s*** and a liar,” Musk responded to Kristof, who argued that “kids died unnecessarily” due to USAID cutting off funding “abruptly with no time for countries to adjust.”
It’s far from the first time Musk has resorted to name-calling his critics. He has a long track record of flinging personal insults at his detractors when confronted with the consequences of his actions.
Other netizens also pointed out that Musk was similarly wrong about COVID-19, betting $1 million that it would quickly fade — and similarly melting down when deaths grew far beyond his prediction.
Despite the near-trillionaire’s decidedly immature objections, his decision to lead his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to dismantle USAID last year has been nothing short of disastrous for humanitarian efforts around the world.
As Kristof has extensively reported for the NYT, the massive gap in funding has caused cases of HIV/AIDS and malaria to spike. According to a March 2025 report by the Center for Global Development, US assistance once saved around 3.3 million lives worldwide per year, meaning that millions more are now at risk.
A 2025 study published in the journal Lancet found that the “current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million in children younger than age five, by 2030.”
Despite DOGE claiming it was trying to save the government money, foreign aid is not even a “rounding-error of our wealth to save millions of lives overseas,” Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk, who led disaster relief for USAID during the COVID-19 pandemic, tweeted.
Indeed, the US government spent anywhere between 0.7 and 1.4 percent of its total federal budget on foreign aid before the most cuts.
“In polling, huge majorities of Americans support this,” Konyndyk added. “Empathy is an American value; just not to sociopathic weirdos like Rufo & Elon.”
Besides basic levels of empathy, there are a litany of other reasons the US once provided foreign aid, from soft power and political influence to securing its own interests abroad. As Kristof later pointed out, “USAID served our interests as well as our values, by protecting us from diseases like the Ebola outbreak now ravaging Congo.”
According to the Harvard School of Public Health, USAID cuts are fueling the spread of new strains of the deadly disease in the central African nation.
More on Musk: Elon Musk Confronted With List of People He’s Killed, Including Children
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