Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates is finally saying what he really thinks about Elon Musk’s DOGE shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he told the Financial Times.
Musk canceled grants to a hospital in Gaza Province, Mozambique, that prevents women from transmitting HIV to their babies because he thought the U.S. was supplying condoms to the terrorist group 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 FT.
Back in February, Musk announced that his secretive cost-cutting initiative, the “department” of government efficiency, was dismantling USAID, the agency responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and developmental assistance.
At the time, Gates said he was “a little disappointed” by Musk’s efforts. Now he’s warning the sudden cuts have left life-saving food and medicines expiring in warehouses, according to the FT.
Musk and DOGE did not respond to the paper’s requests for comment.
The comments came as the Microsoft co-founder announced he plans to accelerate his giving over the next 20 years, spending $200 billion of both his foundation money and his own personal fortune before closing the Gates Foundation entirely in 2045.
Established in 2000 when Gates was the world’s richest man, the foundation has poured more than $100 billion into nonprofit causes and helped save tens of millions of lives, according to The New York Times.
Going forward, most of the foundation’s $10 billion annual budget will be spend on global health, with a continuing focus on vaccines, children, and maternal health. The spending, however, won’t make up for the shortfall caused by DOGE’s cuts to USAID, which had an annual budget of $44 billion.
In countries like Zambia, people are already falling ill with HIV-related symptoms after their USAID-funded clinics were shuttered with no warning in January, NPR reported last month.
President Donald Trump’s administration had said life-saving programs like the distribution of HIV medication would continue despite the DOGE cuts, but in reality countless people have suddenly lost access to their medication, according to NPR.
Zambia is one of about two dozen countries supported by PEPFAR, the U.S. government program that delivers HIV and AIDS relief abroad. These countries have been progressively investing in their health systems and were scheduled to take full ownership of their HIV responses by 2030, according to a recent study published in The Lancet.
But now, the Trump administration has suddenly halted PEPFAR five years early. Researchers estimate that without the program, an additional 1 million children will be infected with HIV over the next five years, an additional 500,000 will die from AIDS, and 2.8 million will be orphaned, according to The Lancet.
A study in the journal Nature found that if the U.S. ends its annual global health spending, 25 million people could die over the next 15 years.
Musk has been a critic of both government spending and philanthropy, which he once told Gates was “mostly bulls–t.” Instead, he has advocated for commercial solutions, while the Gates Foundation has long been committed to addressing issues that companies are not financially incentivized to tackle.
The two men have also recently clashed over politics, with Gates calling Musk’s pivot to the far right “insane.”
Gates told the FT that by taking away the need to exist in perpetuity, the foundation can spend more money faster on funding decisive solutions to global problems, such as fully eradicating polio and finding a cure for HIV.
The philanthropist also called for the government to receive more revenue through “much more progressive taxation” and said he supported a strong estate tax to prevent “dynastic wealth.”
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