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 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 canceled 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.
The Gates Foundation will close its doors in 2045, decades earlier than previously envisaged. »