Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of ‘killing the world’s poorest children’
Bill Gates announced plans on Thursday to shutter the Gates Foundation in 2045 and also strongly criticized Elon Musk for slashing funding to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), accusing the Tesla CEO of “killing the world’s poorest children” in new interviews.
In an interview with the Financial Times published on Thursday, Gates condemned the sudden funding cuts to USAID by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), saying the cuts had led to life-saving food and medicines expiring in warehouses, and could result in the resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV and polio.
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Gates said.
Since Donald Trump took office in January, he and Musk began cutting funding and scaling back operations at USAID, the US government’s foremost international aid agency, once considered the world’s largest single provider of humanitarian aid. Staffers with Musk’s Doge initiative have worked to hollow out and dismantle the agency and have terminated more than 5,600 USAID workers.
Gates, 69, told the Financial Times that Musk had cancelled grants to a hospital in Gaza province, Mozambique, which he said was working to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to babies, based on the mistaken belief that the US was supplying condoms to Hamas in Gaza in the Middle East.
“I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money,” Gates said. [Continue reading…]