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• Bill Gates accused Elon Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children” by cutting US foreign aid. 
• Gates criticised Musk for dismantling USAID, leading to wasted food and medicines and preventable diseases. 
• Musk, who merged USAID into the State Department, dismissed philanthropy and targeted Gates on social media. 

The feud between billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk ramped up this week, with Gates accusing Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children” through massive cuts to the US Agency for International Development, one of the first targets of Musk’s US Doge Service under the Trump administration. 

In an interview with the Financial Times on Thursday, Gates harshly criticised Musk – the chief executive of Tesla and the world’s richest man – for all but dismantling what had been the world’s largest provider of food assistance. Since President Donald Trump took office, Musk has baselessly accused USAID of being a “criminal organisation” and declared it was “time for it to die”. 

Gates said Musk’s cuts were born of ignorance, citing as one example the cancellation of grants to a hospital in Mozambique’s Gaza province that helped prevent women from transmitting HIV to their babies. Musk previously falsely claimed that the United States was spending US$50 million ($85m)to send condoms to Hamas in Gaza. 

Gates criticised Musk for massive cuts to USAID food assistance. Photo / Getty Images 

“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 told the Financial Times. 

According to the publication, Gates also noted that tonnes of food and medicines were going to waste because of the cuts to US foreign aid, and he warned of the return of preventable diseases. 

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Gates told the Financial Times. 

Gates, 69, is a co-founder of Microsoft and once held the title of world’s richest man. He broadly criticised the Trump administration’s cuts to US foreign aid in interviews with the New York Times Magazine last month, warning that they could lead to 1 million more child deaths per year, and asserted that Musk put the USAID budget “in the wood chipper”. 

Gates’ harsher words for Musk this week came shortly after Gates announced that he planned to wind down his charitable foundation and spend 99% of his wealth by the end of 2045. 

In a blog post detailing his decision, Gates does not mention Musk or the Trump administration, but says “the wealthy have a responsibility to return their resources to society”, citing an 1889 Andrew Carnegie essay. 

“People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that ‘he died rich’ will not be one of them. There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold on to resources that could be used to help people,” Gates wrote. “That is why I have decided to give my money back to society much faster than I had originally planned.” 

Hours after Gates’ interview with the Financial Times published, Musk reposted a clip from The Joe Rogan Experience in which the libertarian podcaster suggested that Gates did not want files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to be released, insinuating that Gates had something to hide. 

Musk, 53, shared that clip early Friday morning with the addition of the bull’s eye emoji on X, the social media platform that he owns. 

Elon Musk's social media account on X.com formerly known as Twitter. 

Representatives for the White House, Tesla and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday morning. 

White House spokesman Harrison Fields told the New York Times on Thursday that Musk was a “patriot” who was working with Trump to “eliminate waste, fraud and abuse”. 

“Backbenchers should celebrate the selfless efforts of America’s most innovative entrepreneur, who is dedicating time to support American taxpayers and hold Washington accountable to the people of this great nation,” Harrison said. 

Gates and Musk have clashed in recent years over their divergent approaches to philanthropy, according to a 2023 biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson. The two billionaires reportedly met in 2022, and Gates tried to persuade Musk to spend some of his wealth on philanthropic initiatives. Musk, however, told Gates that he believed most philanthropy was “bulls***” and was angry with Gates for shorting Tesla stock, according to the Isaacson book. 

Meanwhile, three months into Trump’s second term, Doge’s cuts to US foreign aid have left programmes and their beneficiaries reeling. The Trump administration has axed more than 80% of programmes funded through USAID, removed all but a handful of about 10,000 employees and folded the agency into the State Department. Much of what remains faces an uncertain future. 

USAID and the State Department oversaw some 90% of the US foreign aid budget as of 2023. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio plan to cut State Department funding nearly in half. The full extent of the cuts has yet to be quantified as Trump’s budget takes shape. 

- Amy B Wang & Sammy Westfall, Washington Post