Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates ratcheted up his feud with Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of “killing the world’s poorest children” through what he said were misguided cuts to US development assistance.
Gates, who is announcing a plan to accelerate his philanthropic giving over the next 20 years and close down the Gates Foundation altogether in 2045, said in an interview that the Tesla chief had acted through ignorance.
In February, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in effect shut down the US Agency for International Development, the main conduit for US aid, saying it was “time for it to die”.
The co-founder of Microsoft, and once the world’s richest man himself, said the abruptness of the cuts had left life-saving food and medicines expiring in warehouses and could cause the resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV and polio.
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he told the Financial Times.
Gates said Musk had cancelled grants to a hospital in Gaza Province, Mozambique, that prevents women transmitting HIV to their babies, in the mistaken belief that the US was supplying condoms to 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,” he said.
Gates, 69, on Thursday announced plans to spend virtually his entire fortune over the next 20 years, during which time he estimates his foundation will spend more than $200bn on global health, development and education against $100bn over the previous 25 years. The Gates Foundation will close its doors in 2045, decades earlier than previously envisaged.
Gates said the rationale for accelerated spending was to have maximum impact, with the potential for finding once-and-for all solutions such as eradicating polio and curing HIV.
“It gives us clarity,” he said. “We’ll have a lot more money because we’re spending down over the 20 years, as opposed to making an effort to be a perpetual foundation.”
The foundation will continue to spend the bulk of its budget, which will rise to about $10bn a year, on global health, with vaccines, maternal and child health continuing to be a focus. But Gates said that private philanthropy could not make up the shortfall from the cuts to USAID, whose budget was $44bn last year.
Can Gates’s $200bn plan survive the Trump era?
The philanthropist intends to spend his fortune over the next 20 years. But government budget cuts threaten his ambitions in global health
Gates intends to pass on less than 1 per cent of his wealth to his children. He said he was a supporter of a strong estate tax to prevent “dynastic wealth” and of “much more progressive taxation”.
Critics have accused Gates of using his foundation’s charitable status as a tax shield and of parlaying his billions into undue influence on global health priorities.
In a letter outlining his decision, Gates said: “People will say a lot of things 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 have clashed before over philanthropy. In 2012, Musk signed the Giving Pledge, launched by Bill and Melinda Gates and investor Warren Buffett, through which dozens of billionaires promised to give away at least half their wealth. But Musk later told Gates that philanthropy was mostly “bullshit” and that commercial solutions to problems like climate change, including Tesla’s electric vehicles, were more effective, according to Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson.
Isaacson described Musk’s fury in 2022 on learning that Gates had shorted Tesla stock, calling him a hypocrite for trying to make money by undermining a company that was seeking to do good. In a comment at the time on Twitter, now X, Musk posted an unflattering photograph of Gates accompanied by the caption: “In case u need to lose a boner fast.”
Gates told the FT that Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organisation”, had no understanding of what the US agency did or how it operated. Musk in February acknowledged mistaking the Mozambican province of Gaza for the Palestinian territory, saying that “some of the things that I say will be incorrect”.
Gates has been more restrained in his criticism of Donald Trump, saying he may not have fully understood the impact of cuts and holding out the prospect that some could be reversed. The Gates Foundation is one of many that fear the US president might try to remove their tax-free status through an executive order.
Gates criticised Trump’s appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr as secretary of health, saying that Kennedy had “attacked vaccines, and specifically my role . . . with a lot of falsehoods”.
But he reserved his sternest criticism for Musk, whose cuts he said threatened to undermine 25 years of Gates Foundation work. Gates once told Isaacson that Musk should spend more time worrying about life on Earth than seeking solutions on other planets. “He’s overboard on Mars,” he said.
Musk and Doge did not respond to requests for comment.
Additional reporting by Joe Miller in Washington