Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO will likely make him the richest person to ever walk the earth. And while his mountain of bad behavior could fill many books, one fact stands out: Last year, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worst of all – happily.
This is not an honest person, but his abuse in the world is very dangerous. In the first months of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Musk-led Department of Government Operations (DOGE) destroyed the US Agency for International Development, whose work has been a boon to public health around the world. Musk called the life-saving agency a “criminal organization” and gloated about spending the weekend “feeding USAID from a wood chipper.” It was a good reference if you wanted everyone to think you were a killer Fargo. Mission accomplished, Elon.
In the following months, public health models will show Musk it was a killer, to a much greater degree than any Coen brothers villain. A tracker co-created by Boston University professor Brooke Nichols predicted the death of more than 780,000 people – mostly children, mostly children – as a result of the Trump administration’s early 2025 cuts to USAID, caused by malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and more. This death was widely predicted from the beginning, a direct, known, and undeniable result of DOGE’s actions. We don’t know the exact number of deaths, but many experts working on the scale of the disaster generally agree that it is in the hundreds of thousands. Researchers around the world, who publish on The environmentprojects that USAID cuts could lead to 163,500 child deaths per year. Also published in The Lancet says there may be millions more to come. Musk showed no signs of caring.
Musk showed no signs of caring
During a televised Cabinet meeting at the White House in 2025, Musk, wearing a MAGA hat signed by his boss, giggled about the “accident” of canceling to prevent Ebola. He said it is a mistake that will be corrected. USAID spokesman Nicholas Enrich, testifying before Congress, said the fix was never forthcoming. More than a year after Musk’s comments, Africa is facing what could be the worst Ebola outbreak ever. And DOGE’s clarity on USAID goes beyond the recent Ebola crisis. According to Enrich, the HIV rate among newborns was close to zero, until Musk intervened.
You might think that Musk’s actions to end effective health care systems around the world are at odds with his desperate desire to increase birth rates, but not if you think this guy is a big racist. The list is too long to keep score, but a few key points are important: He’s ramped up rhetoric of “white genocide” in South Africa, spent much of January posting pro-white talking points, and recently promoted race riots in the UK all to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment. Is there any doubt as to why this guy had so much fun destroying one of the most successful global health systems in history, which has saved millions of black people?
The Trump administration is full of zealots, but some of those people look at Musk like, “Now this the guy is really crazy,” Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told us Vanity Fair that Musk was “a complete solo artist.” He says he “probably knew” what he was doing would “horrify others,” but he did it anyway. (Unfortunately, Wiles also said he was “indignant at first” about his behavior, which pretty much sums up the Republican response to the party’s turmoil.)
Speaking to SpaceX employees on the day of the IPO, Musk said, “There are always problems on Earth. There are always things that we want to improve, that we want to solve here on Earth, and we have to solve them. But there should also be things that make you excited about the future.” Sounds good, until you consider one of the latest plans Musk was excited about was killing efforts to save children’s lives from deadly diseases. In fact, “there are always problems in the World” is the kind of thing you say when you ignore most of those problems.
Guess what, Elon? There are many things about the future that people are excited about when they wake up in the morning. He fired a lot of them for no good reason, and there are a lot of bad ones. The news from the fired USAID employees is heartbreaking, as are many similar stories from many people in the US and other countries who have devoted their lives to activities ranging from protecting the dignity and health of people to preserving our natural habitats. I have met many of these people personally, and unlike the man who fired them, they did not get into public office for private gain.
Musk hijacked the government to destroy these machines
Musk hijacked the government to destroy these machines and humiliate these people by working on a complete lie that it would make the government work better. Yes, there is a big difference between being “efficient” and not being efficient. An agency does not function well in its absence; just killed. A fire department with no firefighters looks good on the balance sheet if you ignore the fact that the city is burning.
The deliberate destruction of the ability to save lives and reduce suffering is a moral act – the kind that would prevent any reasonable, benevolent person from empowering anyone who can do it. But we are here. And while there has always been a wealthy disaster class, including fearsome racists in power who don’t care about suffering, we seem to be crossing the Rubicon with Musk. Few people in history, if ever, will have amassed the same combination of wealth, media power, and governmental influence.
After his reign of terror at the DOGE ended in vain, Musk left the government with the same kind of carefree indifference that marked his tenure. The statistics are strange, but it seems that the DOGE did not save the government any money. Even the libertarian Cato Institute says the DOGE did not cut spending, only government employment, by 9 percent in 10 months. But if you look beyond the investment and consider the fact that this project has wasted a lot of technology and energy on our society, it is easy to see that Musk’s project is one of the most unprecedented costs.
Musk is not completely out of government; he still needs those federal contracts for SpaceX, now more than ever. He may be wearing a different hat now, but little else has changed. UX is still a hotbed of misery with Musk in the headlines, and his AI project is a nightmare of misinformation and AI-generated imagery of child sex abuse. This man should not just be kept from having all the money in the world; he probably shouldn’t even be allowed within 500 meters of the school.
Elon Musk proved long ago that he is the wrong man to save the world. It’s worse now. The world needs to be saved from him.
