Bill Gates has taken another swipe at Elon Musk over his government-slashing spree at the Department of Government Efficiency.
CNN host Fareed Zakaria asked whether Musk’s DOGE cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) were attempts to pander to Republicans.
Gates then ridiculed Musk’s DOGE efforts and said his cuts were a “mistake.”
“Well, I think if you show up and say in a few months you can cut $2 trillion out of a $7 trillion budget, you’re not going to succeed,” Gates said on Fareed Zakaria GPS. “So you go for the softest things and, you know, things that are overseas that you can mischaracterize, like, you know, characterizing it as condoms for Hamas—didn’t have one iota of truth—and talking about people that he hasn’t spent time with.”
The exchange comes on the heels of similar comments Gates made to The New York Times, in which the Microsoft founder said that Musk had put the agency through “the wood chipper” and accused him of being “involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”
Gates also blasted Musk for targeting areas he had not been to. Gates has made multiple trips to Africa through his work with the Gates Foundation, which he said introduced him to the work USAID had done.
“I go to Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, you know, meet the USAID people,” Gates said in the interview Sunday. “[Musk] is a genius in some domains, but in global health, it hasn’t been a focus. And so I’d say that, you know, firing all those people and cutting off all that money—that was a mistake.”
Gates has frequently attacked Musk since President Donald Trump won the election. He told The Times of London in January that it was “really insane that [Musk] can destabilize the political situations in countries” and blasted Musk’s speech to Germany’s far-right political party Alternative for Germany as “insane s–t.”
Musk has also sniped at Gates over the years, once telling the Microsoft billionaire that most philanthropy was “bulls–t” and Gates would be better off investing in Tesla, according to author Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk.
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