Musk's USAID Cuts: A Silicon Valley Genocide

Last week, Elon Musk threatened Rep. Ro Khanna for saying that an estimated 4.5 million children will die as a result of Musk feeding USAID “into the woodchipper.”

But the statement hurts because it’s true. By January, over 700,000 people had already died preventable deaths due to the USAID cuts, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota:

One year after the Trump administration began its dismantling of USAID, a model that tracks the impact of USAID funding cuts on global disease prevention programs estimates that more than 762,000 people have died as a result of those cuts, including more than 500,000 children.

These deaths are the inevitable outcome of slashing life-saving aid programs. With the wave of a chainsaw, the richest man in the world condemned the poorest people in the world to death. Then he became a “trillionaire.”

This is like a 21st-century version of a Greek myth. Either Elon Musk is doomed—or humanity is. Musk’s legacy won’t be electric cars, spaceships or satellites. Musk’s legacy is dead children.