Elon Musk—showing increasing anger over allegations the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development by his short-lived Department of Government Efficiency had fatal consequences—lashed out at critics on the social platform he owns, even as a number of studies support those claims.
One study found Musk’s closing of the U.S. Agency for International Development could cause the deaths of millions of children.
Musk, in a post on X on Sunday, claimed those who say DOGE’s USAID cuts resulted in deaths “cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!”
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who last year identified specific people he says died after USAID-backed services were disrupted, quickly responded with the names of four he said died because of the cuts, including an 8-year-old girl, and suggested the world’s richest person travel to Africa with him to “talk to these moms and dads, and you’ll see the dying children themselves.”
Musk has disputed claims the USAID cuts caused deaths multiple times over the last year: In March 2025, Musk argued “no one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” and earlier this month he responded to a story from The Verge titled “The World’s First Trillionaire Is a Killer,” by writing, “If I were, the douchebags at Verge would have been dead long ago."
