Elon Musk has spent recent days insisting that nobody has died from the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the foreign aid agency that was unlawfully abolished with Musk’s help at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. “If cutting USAID killed a child… A single child. It would be covered by the Media like the biggest story in history,” one Musk fan wrote Monday on X. “Exactly,” Musk wrote in a quote tweet Tuesday, endorsing the message. The trillionaire oligarch even insisted that USAID is the one that’s killed people, retweeting a conspiracy theory from Rand Paul that Anthony Fauci was to blame for the covid-19 pandemic because federal funds were being used to conduct gain of function research.
“USAID money killed millions,” Musk wrote Tuesday.. Admittedly, U.S. intelligence agencies now endorse the idea that covid-19 escaped from a lab, but that only happened after President Trump took office for a second time. Before Trump took control, intel agencies were largely skeptical of the idea.
Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency took a chainsaw to the federal government last year, with the Tesla CEO bragging on Feb. 3, 2025 that, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” And researchers have been tallying the death toll ever since. It’s particularly interesting that Musk keeps saying that his role in dismantling USAID would be huge news if someone actually died. Because we have so many news stories about those deaths.
