Atrocity.
Content warning: Evil.
This article is wildly different in tone than my usual writing, but I feel ethically bound to write it nevertheless. I believe that the data clearly show that human civilization is rapidly morally improving itself overall1, but a hideous crime has lately been committed and must be faced.
This article is extremely dark and disturbing, very much unlike my usual subjects. But I think it’s an important one-time exception. Read on only if you’re comfortable with that.
Years ago, I used to deeply admire Elon Musk.
It’s hard to remember now, but in the early and mid-2010s, he was one of the most inspiring figures in America fighting climate change. He was building cool electric cars! Reusable rockets that actually worked! He was like a real-life Tony Stark!
Then he went down the rabbit hole of hatred and insanity. Or maybe was always there and just showed it, who knows. In the second Trump administration, inaugurated in January 2025, Musk was given legally questionable authorities to slash executive branch program funding as head of the meme-inspired “DOGE” program.
One of the top priorities of DOGE, in Musk’s own words, was “feeding USAID into the woodchipper.” With maximum speed and no warning, he cut almost all funding to the United States Agency for International Development, which funds food and medicine for the world’s poorest in refugee camps and desperate villages around the world. It accounted for just 0.3% of U.S. federal spending in 2024. Some of the programs it administered, like PEPFAR which provided AIDS relief to millions, were among the most cost-effective ways of saving human lives in the history of the world.
One of the noblest things this or any country has ever done was destroyed in weeks.
Here’s what happened next.
“The impacts of the cuts were immediate and tragic.
Health clinics and emergency ambulance services shuttered overnight.
Clinical trials were deserted.
Thousands of healthcare workers lost their jobs. Lifesaving food and medicine was left to expire in warehouses.
According to conservative estimates, in the year since USAID was dismantled, 750,000 people have died as a result of the cuts.
For the first time in a generation, more children died in one year — 2025—than in the previous year.”
Boston University has developed an “Impact Counter” tool tracking all USAID and global public health cuts driven by Musk’s DOGE wrecking crew in 2025, and their impact in the following year. Some studies have warned of potential long-term impacts over the next decade ranging into the millions of deaths, but that’s not counting national and NGO efforts, which have already begun, to fill the gap left by USAID’s rapid and unplanned destruction.
So this is the extremely conservative estimate. The bare minimum. Not what might happen, but what has already happened, from early 2025 to early 2026. The people who have already been killed when the United States abandoned its duty of care because a billionaire wanted it to.
Elon Musk caused, in one year, 780,000 human deaths, most of them children.
That’s about in the middle of the range of estimated death tolls for the Cathar/Albigensian genocide of 1209-29, Armenian genocide of 1915-17, the Bangladeshi genocide of 1971, or the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
Putting another way, between four and five Guatemalan genocides.
Or one-tenth of one Holocaust.
And that’s just the deaths.
“The sudden and severe foreign aid cuts imposed this year by U.S. President Donald Trump, along with funding reductions from other countries, shuttered thousands of the camps’ schools and youth training centers and crippled child protection programs. Beyond unwanted marriages, scores of children as young as 10 were forced into backbreaking manual labor, and girls as young as 12 forced into prostitution. With no safe space to play or learn, children were left to wander the labyrinthine camps, making them increasingly easy targets for kidnappers. And the young and desperate were picked off by traffickers who promised to restore what the children had lost: Hope.
In a sweltering building not far from the cramped shelter where her husband tortures her, Hasina plays nervously with the strap of her pink mobile phone case, emblazoned with the words “Forever Young.”
She is still young, she says. But the aid cuts forced her into womanhood and into a nightmare. Not long after marrying her husband, she says, he isolated her from her family and began to beat and sexually abuse her. She daydreams daily of school, where she was a whiz at English and hoped to become a teacher. Now, she is confined largely to her shelter, cooking and cleaning and waiting with dread for the next beating.”
— Associated Press article on the impact of USAID cuts in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh.
In Kakuma, a vast refugee camp near the South Sudan border, starting in spring, our documentary team followed clinicians and families inside the stabilization unit at Clinic 7, where the sickest children come. Because of the termination of U.S. support, the World Food Programme’s supplies had been reduced to forty per cent of minimum needs, and cases of acute malnutrition had surged. Two-thirds of the clinic’s community health workers were laid off, hobbling the early-detection system that once saved most children before they needed acute care. Clinic 7 is where we met Rovina Naboi, who had fled South Sudan with her family. In our short film, she reveals what it was like trying to keep her desperately ill daughter, Jane Sunday, alive in a system that has broken down.
I genuinely believe that if this information, this widely reported publicly available information, were truly broadly comprehended, if every single human alive could obtain a genocide museum-level visceral understanding of the pointless mass suffering that this man has inflicted, Elon Musk would not be able to go out in public anywhere on the planet without being justifiably killed by a lynch mob.
Elon Musk did not order men to go shoot those children in the head or cut their throats with machetes or choke them to death in gas chambers. But he did (illegally) order men to snatch the food from their mouths and the medicine from their veins, despite overwhelming evidence that it would directly cause their imminent deaths. Perhaps the closest comparison is the Holodomor of the 1930s, in which three to five million Ukrainians were killed by Stalin’s deliberate imposition of famine conditions.
At this point, praising Musk for Tesla and SpaceX is like praising Hitler for Volkswagen and V-2 rockets. It may be completely true as far it goes, but it’s missing the bigger picture in the most morally outrageous manner possible. Yeah, they’re real and impressive technologies! Yeah, they could develop into stuff that’s really useful for civilization! Reusable rockets are cool and important even though Musk ran SpaceX, just like rockets in general are cool even though Hitler ran the V-2 program.
But that’s REALLY REALLY not the most notable thing about this guy’s impact on the world anymore! The hundreds of thousands of literal actual human children that he actually really caused to die pointless tragic deaths are the most notable thing about this guy’s impact on the world! No amount of good tech startup management can ever possibly even come close to excusing that!
Unlike Hitler, it’s possible Musk may not even have hated the hundreds of thousands of children he killed — though the increasingly ultra-racist tone of his social media argues otherwise. It’s possible he disbelieved the warnings about USAID’s importance, that this mass murder was caused not by intent but by history’s worst case of ignorant, lazy and callous indifference.
I think popular Substacker Scott Alexander wrote an excellent response to that hypothetical excuse, which I shall now quote at length.
“Politics is nasty and sometimes involves lies. But the thousands of doctors, nurses, and charity workers who give up more lucrative careers elsewhere to save lives in the developing world are some of my heroes. I’ve talked to many of these people (see my father’s story of his time in this world here) and I couldn’t do what they do for a month, let alone a whole career. When Trump and Rubio try to tar them as grifters in order to make it slightly easier to redistribute their Congress-earmarked money to kleptocrats and billionaire cronies, this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell…
I have delivered medicine in a Third World country. I’ve helped treat patients who were definitely going to die within a year, for want of medication that would be routine anywhere else. I’ve looked in parents’ eyes while telling them their kid wasn’t going to recover. It sucks…
I think if Elon had the same experiences I had, he wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night for fear that he had accidentally cancelled PEPFAR. He would have been calling his lieutenants at odd hours of the morning, all through the winter and early spring, saying “Hey, you definitely didn’t cancel the developing world medical funding, did you?” and the lieutenants would respond “Elon, you’ve asked me that four times tonight already, please stop obsessing over this.”
In my personal opinion, Elon Musk has become far, far, far worse than Osama bin Laden. He has killed orders of magnitude more innocent children.
I don’t support the death penalty, though this case has tested that principle more than any other. I would prefer that everyone involved in this atrocity be charged for their crimes against humanity in a modern vision of the Nuremberg trials, and ideally jailed for multiple life sentences.
Musk is not quite history’s greatest monster. But he’s pretty high on the list, definitely in the top 1002. It is obscene beyond words that he is also the world’s first trillionaire.
That’s my comment on the SpaceX IPO.
Vote blue in November.
A 2024 United Nations report found that as public health advances, the number of child deaths around the world reached an all-time low in 2022—not just the rate, but the number! Over 12 million human children under the age of five died in 1990, but only around 5 million died in 2022, despite the human population growing from less than 5.5 billion to over 8 billion in that time.
The 2025 atrocity of USAID cuts killing 500,000 of the world’s poorest children is heinous and unforgivable, but in the very long-term big picture it will appear, like COVID, as an anomalous year or two of horror in the long-run trend of fewer and fewer child deaths. Of course, that’s no excuse. I’m just sharing it to provide some context, and hopefully comfort those readers who have made it this far in such a painful article.
Needless to say, Trump and Rubio belong on that list too, and are equally morally culpable and vile for facilitating such senseless mass death. There’s a lot of blame to go around here. I’m just focusing on Musk in this post because of the recent trillionaire status.
A super and aptly timed post
Elon Musk is evil, period.
Even if he had stopped the aid - but provided a year-long roll down - there could have been time to get other support in place.
Elon and his minions do not consider poor people (especially those of colour) to be “real humans” and that where the rot starts and ends.
Thanks very much for this, Sam. I've had these thoughts in my head too ever since USAID was sacrificed for the racist grift machine, and have made some comments in my writing, but I'm glad you articulated the problem with depth and breadth. I'll send readers your way next week. I'd really like to see this story out in the media, partly bc it will undercut the weird pedestal Musk is on, but mainly bc it will remind everyone of those millions of people sacrificed by this administration.