In April, Ezibon Khamis was dispatched to Akobo, South Sudan, to document the horrors as humanitarian services collapsed in the middle of a cholera outbreak. As a representative of the NGO Save the Children, Khamis would be able to show the consequences of massive cuts to U.S. foreign assistance made by the Department of Government Efficiency and the State Department. Seven of the health facilities that Save the Children had supported in the region have fully closed, and 20 more have partly ceased operations.
Khamis told us about passing men and women who carried the sick on their shoulders like pallbearers. Children and adults were laid on makeshift gurneys; many vomited uncontrollably. These human caravans walked for hours in up to 104-degree heat in an attempt to reach medical treatment, because their local clinics had either closed completely or run out of ways to treat cholera. Previously, the U.S. government had provided tablets that purified the water in the region, which is home to a quarter-million people, many of whom are fleeing violent conflicts nearby. Not anymore, Khamis says; now many have resorted to drinking untreated river water. He told us that at least eight people—five of them children—had died on their journey that day. As he entered a health facility in Akobo, he was confronted by a woman. “She just said, ‘You abandoned us,’” Khamis told us.
We heard other such stories in our effort to better understand what happened when DOGE dismantled the United States Agency for International Development. In Nigeria, a mother watched one of her infant twins die after the program that had been treating them for severe acute malnutrition shut down. In South Sudan, unaccompanied children were unable to reunite with surviving relatives at three refugee camps, due to other cuts. Allara Ali, a coordinator for Doctors Without Borders who oversees the group’s work at Bay Regional Hospital, in Somalia, told us that children are arriving there so acutely malnourished and “deteriorated” that they cannot speak—a result of emergency-feeding centers no longer receiving funds from USAID to provide fortified milks and pastes. Fifty percent of the children with severe acute malnutrition are dying within the first two days of admission at Bay Regional, Doctors Without Borders wrote to us. Many mothers who travel more than 100 miles so that a doctor might see their child return home without them.
One man has consistently cheered and helped execute the funding cuts that have exacerbated suffering and death. In February, Elon Musk, acting in his capacity as a leader of DOGE, declared that USAID was “a criminal organization,” argued that it was “time for it to die,” and bragged that he’d “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
Musk did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article. Last month, in an interview with Bloomberg, he argued that his critics have been unable to produce any evidence that these cuts at USAID have resulted in any real suffering. “It’s false,” he said. “I say, ‘Well, please connect us with this group of children so we can talk to them and understand more about their issue,’ we get nothing. They don’t even try to come up with a show orphan.”
Musk is wrong, as our reporting shows—and as multiple other reports (and estimates) have also shown. But the issue here is not just that Musk is wrong. It is that his indifference to the suffering of people in Africa exists alongside his belief that he has a central role to play in the future of the human species. Musk has insisted that people must have as many children as possible—and is committed to siring a “legion” himself—and that we must become multiplanetary. Perhaps more than anyone else on Earth, Musk, the wealthiest man alive, has the drive, the resources, and the connections to make his moon shots a reality. His greatest and most consistent ambition is to define a new era for humankind. Who does he believe is worthy of that future?
For more than 20 years, Musk has been fixated on colonizing Mars. This is the reason he founded his rocket company, SpaceX; Musk recently proclaimed that its Starship program—an effort to create reusable rockets that he believes will eventually carry perhaps millions of humans to the Red Planet—is “the key branching point for human destiny or destiny of consciousness as a whole.” This civilizational language is common—he’s also described his Mars ambitions as “life insurance for life collectively.”
He claims to be philosophically aligned with longtermism, a futurist philosophy whose proponents—self-styled rationalists—game out how to do the most good for the human race over the longest time horizon. Classic pillars of longtermism are guarding against future pandemics and addressing concerns about properly calibrating artificial intelligence, all with a focus on protecting future generations from theoretical threats. Musk’s Mars obsession purports to follow this logic: An investment in a program that allows humans to live on other planets would, in theory, ensure that the human race survives even if the Earth becomes uninhabitable. Musk has endorsed the work of at least one longtermist who believes that this achievement would equate to trillions of lives saved in the form of humans who would otherwise not be born.
Saving the lives of theoretical future children appears to be of particular interest to Musk. On X and in interviews, he continuously fixates on declining birth rates. “The birth rate is very low in almost every country. And so unless that changes, civilization will disappear,” Musk told Fox News’s Bret Baier earlier this year. “Humanity is dying.” He himself has fathered many children—14 that we know of—with multiple women. Musk’s foundation has also donated money to fund population research at the University of Texas at Austin. An economics professor affiliated with that research, Dean Spears, has argued in The New York Times that “sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries—many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them.”
But Musk’s behavior and rhetoric do not track with the egalitarian principles these interests would suggest. The pronatalist community that he is aligned with is a loose coalition. It includes techno-utopians and Peter Thiel acolytes, but also more civic-minded thinkers who argue for better social safety nets to encourage more people to have families. The movement is also linked to regressive, far-right activists and even self-proclaimed eugenicists. In 2023, The Guardian reported that Kevin Dolan, the organizer of a popular pronatalist conference, had said on a far-right podcast that “the pronatalist and the eugenic positions are very much not in opposition, they’re very much aligned.” Via his X account, Musk has amplified to his millions of followers the talk given by Dolan at that 2023 conference.
Although other prominent pronatalists disavow the eugenics connection, the movement’s politics can veer into alarming territory. In November 2024, The Guardian reported that Malcolm and Simone Collins, two of the pronatalist movement’s most vocal figures, wrote a proposal to create a futuristic city-state designed to save civilization that included the “mass production of genetically selected humans” to create a society that would “grant more voting power to creators of economically productive agents.” Last month, the Times reported that Musk has “privately” spent time with the Collinses.
Musk has also dabbled with scientific racism on X. The centibillionaire has engaged with and reposted statements by Jordan Lasker, a proponent of eugenics who goes by the name Crémieux online, according to reporting from The Guardian. On his Substack, Lasker has written about supposed links between national identity and IQ—defending at length an analysis that suggests that people in sub-Saharan Africa have “very low IQs” on average. Musk may not have explicitly commented on Lasker’s work, which implies a relationship between race and intelligence, but in 2024, he responded favorably to an X post that argued that “HBCU IQ averages are within 10 points of the threshold for what is considered ‘borderline intellectual impairment.’” The original post was ostensibly criticizing a United Airlines program that gave students at three historically Black colleges and universities an opportunity to interview for a pilot-training program. In his response to that post, Musk wrote, “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE.” (“DIE” is Musk’s play on DEI.)
Musk frequently engages in this type of cagey shitposting—comments that seem to endorse scientific racists or eugenicist thinking without outright doing so. Those seeking to understand the worldview of one of the most powerful men on Earth are left to find the context for themselves. That context should include Musk’s own family history, starting with his upbringing during the apartheid regime in South Africa and the beliefs of his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, who, as Joshua Benton reported for The Atlantic in 2023, was a radical technocrat and anti-Semite who wrote of the “very primitive” natives of South Africa after he moved there from Canada.
As Benton correctly notes, the sins of the grandfather are not the sins of the grandson; Musk’s father, for example, was a member of an anti-apartheid party in South Africa, and Ashlee Vance reported in his biography of Musk that the apartheid system was a primary reason Musk left South Africa. But, as Benton also writes, “when Musk tweets that George Soros ‘appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization’—in response to a tweet blaming Soros for an ‘invasion’ of African migrants into Europe—he is not the first in his family to insinuate that a wealthy Jewish financier was manipulating thousands of Africans to advance nefarious goals.”
Musk is also preoccupied with the far-right theory of white genocide, posting at various points in the past couple of years on X about how he feels there is a plot to kill white South Africans. Though South Africa has among the highest murder rates in the world, there is no evidence of a systematic white genocide there. Yet during Musk’s political tenure, the Trump administration welcomed 59 white Afrikaner refugees while effectively closing off admission from other countries, including Sudan and the Republic of the Congo.
Here’s a thought experiment: Based on the programs that Musk has cut, based on the people he meets with and reads, based on the windows we have into his thinking, who do you imagine might be welcomed on the Starship? On X, Musk has implied that the following are all threats to “Western Civilization”: DEI programs, George Soros, the supposedly left-wing judiciary, and much of what gets put under the umbrella of “wokeness.” Transgender-youth rights, according to Musk, are a “suicidal mind virus” attacking Western civilization.
Even the idea of empathy, Musk argues, is a kind of existential threat. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said in February on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response,” he said of liberal politicians and activists. Musk, of course, was defending his tenure in the federal government, including his dismantling of USAID. Canceling programs overseas is consistent with his philosophy that “America is the central column that holds up all the places in civilization,” as he told Baier during his Fox appearance. Follow that logic: Cutting global aid frees up resources that can be used to help Americans, who, in turn, can work toward advancing Western civilization, in part by pursuing a MAGA political agenda and funding pronatalist programs that allow for privileged people (ideally white and “high IQ”) to have more children. The thinking seems to go like this: Who cares if people in South Sudan and Somalia die? Western civilization will thrive and propagate itself across the cosmos.
Those who believe in this kind of thinking might say that line items on USAID’s ledger are only of minor consequence in the grand scheme of things. But the world is not governed by the logic of a science-fiction plot. “The fact is, it’s all interconnected,” Catherine Connor, the vice president of public policy at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, told us when we asked about the grants Musk’s team had terminated at USAID. “If you take one thing away, you’ve broken a link in a chain.” She described a situation that her organization is seeing play out on the ground right now, where new HIV-positive mothers take their infants for a dry-blood-spot test to determine if the child has HIV as well. The spot test must be transported to a lab to get results, which will determine if a child is HIV positive and if they should receive lifesaving medication. “In many of our sites, in many of the countries we’re working in, that lab transport has been terminated,” Connor said. “So we can do all these things, but because we lost the lab part, we don’t know if this child’s HIV-positive or not.” A link in the chain is broken; people are left on their own. The future becomes less certain, a bit darker.
“There’s a sense of despondence, a sense of hopelessness that I haven’t sensed in my time working in this field,” Connor said. “The level of uncertainty and the level of anxiety that’s been created is almost as damaging as the cuts themselves.” It seems this hopelessness is a feature of a worldview committed to eradicating what Musk calls “suicidal empathy.” Regardless, Musk, it appears, is much more interested in talking about his self-landing rockets and a future he promises is just on the horizon.
But much as Musk might want us to divert our eyes upward, something terrible is happening on Earth. The world’s richest man is preventing lifesaving aid from reaching the world’s poorest children, closing off their future as he fantasizes about another.
Illustration Sources: Oranat Taesuwan / Getty; Neutronman / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty.
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