The world’s first trillionaire is a killer

Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO will probably make him the richest person to ever walk the planet. And while his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully.

This is not a serious person, but his abuse of the world is deadly serious. In the first months of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) destroyed the US Agency for International Development, whose mission was a boon to public health around the globe. Musk called the lifesaving agency a “criminal organization” and blithely celebrated spending a weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” It was a good reference if you want everyone to think you’re the killer in Fargo. Mission accomplished, Elon.

In the months that followed, public health models would indicate Musk was a killer, at a far greater scale than any Coen brothers villain. A tracker co-created by Boston University professor Brooke Nichols projected over 780,000 deaths — mostly of children, many of infants — due to the Trump administration’s early-2025 USAID cuts, caused by malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and more. These deaths were widely predicted from the beginning, a direct, known, and undeniable consequence of DOGE’s actions. We don’t know the precise number of deaths, but multiple experts working on identifying the scale of the tragedy have generally agreed it’s in the hundreds of thousands. Global researchers, publishing in Nature, project that the cuts to USAID could result in 163,500 child deaths yearly. Another publication in The Lancet says there could be millions more to come. Musk showed no sign of caring.

During a televised cabinet meeting at the White House in 2025, Musk, wearing a murdered-out MAGA hat signed by his boss, had a giggle about “accidentally” canceling Ebola prevention. He said it was a mistake that would be fixed. USAID whistleblower Nicholas Enrich, testifying before Congress, said that fix never came. A little more than a year after Musk’s comments, Africa is facing what could become the worst Ebola outbreak ever. And DOGE’s cleaver to USAID goes well beyond the latest Ebola crisis. According to Enrich, the HIV rate among new babies being born was looking close to zero, until Musk intervened.

You might think Musk’s actions gutting effective global health programs clash with his downright creepy quest to raise birth rates, but not when you consider the guy is also a huge racist. The list is too long to keep score, but a few relevant highlights: He’s stoked claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa, spent most of January posting other white supremacist talking points, and most recently has been encouraging race riots in the UK all to gin up anti-immigrant sentiments. Is there any doubt about why this guy had so much fun destroying one of the most successful global health initiatives in history, which saved millions of Black people?

The Trump administration is packed with extremists, but even some of those folks looked at Musk like, “Now this guy is really wild.” Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told Vanity Fair that Musk was a “complete solo actor.” She says he “probably knew” that what he was doing “would be horrifying to others,” but did it anyway. (Unfortunately, Wiles also said she was only “initially aghast” at his conduct, which pretty much sums up the Republican response to the party’s own chaos.)

As he addressed SpaceX employees on IPO day, Musk said, “There are always problems on Earth. There are always things we wish to be better, that we want to solve here on Earth, and we should solve them. But there also have to be things that get you excited about the future.” Sounds good, until you consider one of the recent projects Musk got excited about was killing immunization efforts that save the lives of children from deadly diseases. In fact, “there are always problems on Earth” is the kind of thing you say when you actually don’t care about a lot of those problems.

Guess what, Elon? There are plenty of things about the future that people get excited about when they wake up in the morning. You fired a bunch of them for no good reason, and a lot of bad ones. The stories from fired USAID workers are heartbreaking, like so many similar stories from so many people in the US and abroad who had dedicated their lives to missions that range from protecting the dignity and health of human beings to preserving our natural lands. I’ve met plenty of these folks personally, and unlike the man who fired them, they didn’t enter public service for private benefit.

Musk hijacked the government to destroy these missions and dehumanize these people in service of the total lie that it would make the government more efficient. Of course, there’s a big difference between “efficiency” and incompetence. An agency isn’t more efficient if it doesn’t exist; it’s simply been murdered. A fire department with no firefighters looks good on a balance sheet if you can ignore that the city is ablaze.

The intentional destruction of the ability to save lives and reduce suffering is psychopathic behavior — the kind that would prevent any rational, kind person from giving power to anyone capable of it. But here we are. And while there has always been a class of mega-rich menaces, including horrible racists in power who are indifferent to suffering, we seem to be crossing the Rubicon with Musk. Few people in history, if ever, will have accumulated the same combination of wealth, media power, and government influence.

After his reign of terror at DOGE ignobly ended in a fizzle, Musk walked away from government with the same kind of careless indifference that marked his tenure. The math is fuzzy, but it looks like DOGE barely saved the government any money. Even the libertarian Cato Institute says DOGE didn’t reduce spending, only federal employment, by 9 percent in around 10 months. But when you look beyond outlays and consider the fact the operation looted a massive stockpile of expertise and capability from our society, it’s easy to see how Musk’s project is one of the most costly ever.

Musk hasn’t fully moved on from government; he still needs those federal contracts for SpaceX, now more than ever. He might be wearing a different hat now, but little else has changed. X is still a firehose of misery with Musk at the reins, and his AI project is a nightmare of misinformation and AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery. This man shouldn’t just be kept from having all the world’s money; he probably shouldn’t even be let within 500 feet of a school.

Elon Musk proved long ago that he’s the wrong man to save the world. It’s even worse now. The world needs saving from him.