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Bill Gates has accused Elon Musk of “k!lling the world’s poorest children” after the Tesla billionaire scrapped America’s overseas aid agency.
The Microsoft founder, who was formerly the world’s richest man, said Musk’s decisions would result in children in Africa being infected with HIV.
He also criticised a decision by Sir Keir Starmer to cut Britain’s overseas aid budget, calling it “surprising and disappointing”.
Gates said Musk’s decision to strip USAID, the US government’s overseas aid agency, of funding in February would lead to a surge of diseases such as measles, HIV and polio in some of the world’s poorest nations.
“The picture of the world’s richest man k!lling the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he told the Financial Times.
USAID managed more than $40bn in US international aid but Mr Musk cut the organisation, which he branded “a viper’s nest of radical-Left Marxists who hate America” and a “criminal organisation”.
Officials from Musk’s Department for Government Efficiency (Doge) took control of USAID’s offices in early February, sacking nearly all of its staff or placing them on leave. Overseas projects were left in limbo, with staff ordered to return home.
Gates said Musk had cancelled hospital funding to Gaza Province, in Mozambique, falsely claiming that the funding was sending 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 told the Financial Times.
Elon Musk later admitted Doge had made some “mistakes”.
The two billionaires have clashed previously. Mr Musk originally signed Mr Gates’s Giving Pledge, in which billionaires promise to give away half their wealth. However, the Tesla chief later called most philanthropy “bull****”, according to Walter Isaacson, his biographer.
