The billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates accelerated his quarrel with Elon Musk, accusing the richest man in the world to “kill the poorest children in the world” through what he said to be erroneous cuts for American development aid.
Gates, who announces a plan to accelerate his philanthropic donation over the next 20 years and completely close the Gates Foundation in 2045, said in an interview that Tesla chief acted by ignorance.
In February, the so-called Musk’s (DOGE) Department of Government (DOGE) in fact closed the American agency for international development, the main conduct of American aid, saying that it was “time to die”.
Microsoft’s co-founder, and once the richest man in the world himself said that the brutality of cuts had left vital foods and drugs expired in warehouses and could cause the resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV and polio.
“The image of the richest man in the world killing the poorest children in the world is not pretty,” he told Financial Times.
Gates said Musk had canceled subsidies at a hospital in the province of Gaza, Mozambique, which prevents women from transmitting HIV to their babies, in the erroneous conviction that the United States provided condoms in Hamas in Gaza in the Middle East. “I would like him to enter and meet the children who have now been infected with HIV because he cut this money,” he said.
Gates, 69, announced on Thursday his intention to pass almost his fortune over the next 20 years, during which his foundation will spend more than $ 200 billion for health, development and global education against $ 100 billion in the previous 25 years. The Gates Foundation will close in 2045, decades earlier than expected.
Gates said that the justification for accelerated expenses was to have a maximum impact, with the potential to find once and for all solutions such as the eradication of polio and healing of HIV.
“It gives us clarity,” he said. “We will have much more money because we spend in the 20 years, instead of making an effort to be a perpetual base.”
The Foundation will continue to spend most of its budget, which will increase to around $ 10 billion a year, in global health, vaccines, maternal and child health that continue to be a goal. But Gates said that private philanthropy could not compensate for the USAID cup deficit, the budget of which was $ 44 billion last year.
Gates intends to transmit less than 1% of his wealth to his children. He said he was an supporter of a strong inheritance tax to prevent “dynastic wealth” and “much more progressive taxation”.
Critics have accused Gates of using the charitable status of its foundation as a tax shield and transmitting its billions in excessive influence on global health priorities.
In a letter describing his decision, Gates said: “People will say a lot about me when I die, but I am determined that” he died rich “will not be one of them. There are too many urgent problems to solve.”
Gates and Musk clashed before philanthropy. In 2012, Musk signed Dons’ commitment, launched by Bill and Melinda Gates and the investor Warren Buffett, through which dozens of billionaires have promised to give at least half of their wealth. But Musk later told Gates that philanthropy was mainly “bullshit” and that commercial solutions to problems such as climate change, including Tesla electric vehicles, were more effective, according to Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson.
Isaacson described Musk’s fury in 2022 by learning that Gates had shortened Tesla’s stock, calling it a hypocrite of having tried to earn money by undermining a business that sought to do good. In a comment at the time on Twitter, now X, Musk published an unflattering photograph of the doors accompanied by the legend: “In case you need to lose a boner quickly.”
Gates told the FT that Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization”, had no understanding of what the American agency had done or how it operated. Musk in February admitted to having confused the Mozambican province of Gaza with the Palestinian territory, saying that “some of the things I say will be incorrect”.
Gates was more limited in his criticism of Donald Trump, saying that he may not have fully understood the impact of the cuts and maintain the perspective that some could be reversed. The Gates Foundation is one of the many who fear that the American president can try to remove his status as a tax franchise through a decree.
Gates criticized Robert F Kennedy Jr’s appointment by Trump as Secretary of Health, saying that Kennedy had “attacked vaccines, and in particular my role … with a lot of lies”.
But he reserved his most severe criticism for Musk, which he said that the cuts threatened to undermine 25 years of work from the Gates Foundation. Gates once told Isaacson that Musk should spend more time worrying about life on earth than looking for solutions on other planets. “He is on board on Mars,” he said.
Musk and Doge did not respond to requests for comments.
Additional report by Joe Miller in Washington
