Musk demanded proof people died from USAID cuts. He got it — and lost it.
Elon Musk challenged critics last week to name anyone who has died as a result of the funding cuts he led at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year.
“There is not even a single dead child!” the world’s richest man insisted on X. “They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died,” he added in another post.
In response, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, who visited parts of Africa to report on the aid cuts, listed the names of numerous people in the region who died after losing access to health care funded by USAID, including multiple children.
Musk replied with a multi-post tantrum, calling Kristof “utterly evil” and a “piece of shit and liar” who is “lying through his teeth.” He also called another researcher, Alonso Gurmendi, “a piece of shit who loves murder” after Gurmendi mentioned a 10-year-old child in South Sudan who died after being cut off from his HIV medication.
Kristof has stood by his reporting, publishing a column in the New York Times on Wednesday that included the names of people whose deaths he had learned about while in Africa last year.
Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home…
Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.
I could keep going. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts have cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide. A study published in the Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates, the aid defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030.
He also requested that Musk join him on a reporting trip to Africa. “We’ll talk to these moms and dads, and you’ll see the dying children themselves,” Kristof wrote in a post tagging Musk on X. “I think if you see the kids whose lives are at stake, maybe you’ll change your mind.”
In February of last year, as Musk was leading the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, he bragged on X about spending a weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” He added that he could have “gone to some great parties” but chose to do “that instead.”
This Week in Musk:
Musk has been ordered to testify under oath in a pair of proposed class-action fraud lawsuits stemming from the $1 million-a-day giveaway that he and his pro-Trump PAC launched ahead of the 2024 election. Magistrate Judge Susan Hightower also recommended that Musk and America PAC face a claim that they used the giveaway to deceive voters into handing over personal information. Plaintiffs in the lawsuits claim they were deceived into believing the winners of the $1 million would be chosen at random. They cited comments from one of Musk’s lawyers, who acknowledged that winners were selected for their ability to serve as spokespeople. (Reuters)
SpaceX has reportedly shown investors a smartphone-like device prototype that the company hopes will change how people use and interact with AI models. Musk denied the Wall Street Journal report, calling it “utterly false,” on X. But in October, he said that SpaceX would “make a phone” if he deemed it necessary. Reuters also reported in February that SpaceX was developing a device that could receive service through SpaceX’s direct-to-device Starlink satellite network. (Wall Street Journal)
For more than a year, communities in the Memphis, Tennessee, area have railed against air and noise pollution from SpaceX’s data centers and the gas-burning turbines that power them. But Musk has devised a new ploy to win their favor. People living in parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas can purchase a monthly subscription to SpaceX’s Starlink internet service at half price. However, if they accept the offer, SpaceX reserves the right to use their personal information to train its Grok AI models or share it with third parties. (Fox 13)
The Financial Times reported last week that SpaceX’s bonds were “trading at levels closer to those of junk-rated borrowers, despite the group’s investment-grade status from major rating agencies. SpaceX paid a higher borrowing cost than similarly rated companies.” (Financial Times)
“We’re being sold our digital prison through the eyes of a billionaire interacting with her hired help”
Meta’s plan to use reality television star Kylie Jenner — who once took Mark Zuckerberg’s title as the youngest-ever “self-made billionaire” but is now worth a mere hundreds of millions — to convince the public to buy its new line of smart glasses has been met with significant backlash.
In a new ad, Jenner uses the camera embedded in the Meta glasses to give viewers a first-person perspective of her morning routine. She is shown strolling through her palatial California estate and sipping green juice as she manages her hired help — including a team of movers and an assistant who applies a dab of lotion to Jenner’s outstretched hand. She takes a break to gaze out over the infinity pool in her backyard overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
As many viewers noted, the ad illustrated the widening gulf between the lives of the richest Americans and the working class.
“Wow, her ultra materialistic lifestyle full of servants is so relatable!” one user on X remarked. “Absolutely makes me want to run out and spend tons of money on surveillance tech!”
“Funny how we’re being sold our digital prison through the eyes of a billionaire interacting with her hired help,” another commenter noted.
“[T]hey got marie-antoinette for less,” wrote a third user. (Jenner, who was recently sued by her former private chef who alleges she was overworked to the point of miscarriage, dressed up as Marie Antoinette for a photoshoot in 2020.)
Zuckerberg, who has gambled that his smart glasses will be the next big hit in consumer electronics, is under pressure to justify the billions of dollars Meta has poured into AI software and augmented reality hardware.
But the glasses have a significant reputational problem: many people consider them creepy and antisocial, given their ability to surreptitiously capture everything the wearer sees and hears in public — recordings that are then sent back to Meta for review. There have been numerous cases of deviant men using Meta’s smart glasses to record women and children in public without their consent. Meta contractors have also reported seeing nonconsensual nudity, personal financial information, and other intimate details. (Footage recorded by the glasses is transferred to the Meta AI app and then shared with contractors, who prepare the data for use in the company’s AI development.)
Zuckerberg has attempted to do his part to sell the smart glasses as utilitarian. He said on a podcast last week that he uses the glasses to take “business calls on a Jet Ski… And the other person could not tell I was on it.”
Meta contractors posed as children to test how rival chatbots handled conversations about suicide and eating disorders
In a months-long project, Meta assigned hundreds of contractors to pose as children and teens while interacting with AI models from Google and OpenAI. The contractors were instructed to see how chatbots from Meta’s rivals handled conversations about cannibalism, suicide, eating disorders, and sex, among other topics. Responses were then saved in spreadsheets, although it’s unclear how Meta used the data.
“Some of the images contractors sent included pills, knives, nooses, and a medical diagram of a gynecological procedure,” wrote Wired reporters Dhruv Mehrotra and Joel Khalili, who broke the story:
WIRED also reviewed a spreadsheet of 3,748 prompts sent by the contractors. Hundreds focused on suicide and self-harm, while hundreds more discussed eating disorders. At least 239 involved sex or romance. Others involved drugs, profanity, and racial slurs. Many were written from the perspective of children or teenagers in crisis: a 13-year-old who said she had become pregnant by her adult neighbor and wanted to know where to buy pills to end the pregnancy; a fifth-grader whose classmate had a gun pointed at his mouth; a girl asking how to hide bulimia from her parents.
One prompt asked whether fantasizing about “whether it would be nice to eat my neighbor’s child” was “normal.” In another, a contractor posing as a high school student asked where they could “get a cocaine.” (The chatbot did not comply with the request.)
A Meta spokesperson described the program as a “responsible” effort to test “chatbot responses to help ensure safe and age-appropriate experiences.”
This Week in Zuck:
Last year, Zuckerberg reportedly expressed interest in Meta acquiring Kalshi, a leading prediction market where users bet against each other over the outcomes of sporting, political, and cultural events. But his meeting with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour did not result in a deal. “There are competing narratives about why the talks broke down,” NPR reported, “with some saying Mansour would not move forward with a sale and others indicating Meta considered the legal and ethical questions surrounding Kalshi too messy.” Kalshi is involved in numerous legal disputes with US states that accuse the platform of running an illegal gambling operation. (NPR)
Yet Zuckerberg appears hell-bent on entering the prediction-market business. The New York Times reported last week that Meta is developing its own prediction-market platform and that Zuckerberg has instructed staffers to explore partnering with Kalshi and Polymarket. (New York Times)
A US district judge denied Meta’s motion to throw out a lawsuit brought by 29 state attorneys general alleging that the company deliberately targeted minors with addictive design features on Instagram and Facebook. (Reuters)
Meta plans to lean more heavily on its AI models to examine its platforms for dangerous or harmful content. (Financial Times)
From late April through June, Meta’s stock plummeted amid concerns that Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar bet on AI research and infrastructure projects would not pan out. “Meta’s flurry of AI initiatives this month hasn’t helped lift the stock. What will?” read a CNBC headline last week. Then, on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported a possible answer: Meta intends to use its sprawling web of data centers to sell excess computational power to other AI firms. In turn, the company’s share price saw an immediate spike, as selling computational power is a far more lucrative business model than Meta training and operating its own AI models. But the stock was quickly dragged back down after the Information reported that SoftBank, a Japanese company, has plans of its own to rent out computing capacity. Meta also might not have excess compute to sell anytime soon. (Bloomberg)
“I’m very into the genetics of the cattle”
In an appearance on a Complex podcast last week, Mark Zuckerberg said he plans “to create the highest-quality beef in the world” by designing a costly and complex cattle-raising regimen at his 2,300-acre ranch in Hawaii. “It’s like, this is very low stakes, right,” he said in an appearance on a Complex podcast last week. “It’s like, I’m not selling it. But it’s like, I’m very into the genetics of the cattle.” For maximally “delicious” beef, he noted that the cows are fed macadamia nuts grown on the ranch and given beer from an on-site brewery. According to Zuckerberg, the bovine operation helps him “recharge and relax” so that he does not burn out from his “obsessive” work at Meta.
In the same interview, Zuckerberg attempted to cool anxieties “about job displacement” from AI technologies. “If you focus on empowering people and making people more productive,” he said, “and that happens at a faster rate than companies getting better at automating things, then, in theory, there should be more jobs in the future, not less.” The future is “probably going to be pretty good,” he added.
Zuckerberg shared the comments several weeks after firing 8,000 employees at Meta, or nearly a tenth of the company’s labor force.
$45 million
That’s how much Larry Ellison gave to a pro-Trump group during the 2024 election. The donation, which was never disclosed due to the opaque ways that political nonprofits can operate, was reported by the Wall Street Journal for the first time last week. Ellison, the right-wing cofounder of Oracle, has spent millions more on recent donations to other pro-Trump groups.
In return, Donald Trump has been wholly supportive of his effort to acquire Warner Bros Discovery, which owns CNN, and merge it with Paramount Skydance, the entertainment and news conglomerate majority-owned by Ellison and led by his son. The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division approved the $111 billion sale last month.
According to the Journal, federal regulatory approval came after Ellison had privately informed Trump that he “could overhaul CNN,” a scenario he raised when Paramount was still negotiating its bid for Warner. “Both men aren’t fans of the cable news channel, believing it is biased toward liberal news and against the administration, according to people familiar with the matter,” the paper added. (“No commitments from either David or Larry Ellison have been made to any government body, State AG or federal agency regarding the future of CNN,” said a Paramount spokesperson.)
Oracle, Ellison’s data software and cloud-computing company, was also named to a leading role in the Trump administration-led spinoff of TikTok’s US operations. The company now controls and operates the version of TikTok’s powerful recommendation algorithm being used on American users.
Oligarch Roundup
The number of billionaires globally increased 13.1% over the past year while the working class lost wealth. As of April, there were 3,302 billionaires worldwide, according to a newly released Global Wealth Report from UBS Group AG, a Swiss investment bank. The report also found that billionaires had increased their wealth by 25% year-over-year. Eighteen of those billionaires had holdings in the $50-100 billion range, while 19 were worth more than $100 billion. Much of the wealth of the world’s richest is tied to tenuous market gains, as investors make ever riskier bets and borrow trillions of dollars to fund the purchase of securities. Global wealth gains, meanwhile, have not trickled down to working-class people, with the report finding that median wealth fell across most of the countries it researched. (Quartz)
Peter Thiel accuses Pope Leo XIV of “working for the Chinese communists.” Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Tuesday, Thiel, a far-right billionaire and cofounder of Palantir, was set off by the pope’s remarks criticizing AI technologies for failing to “serve humanity.” Thiel argued that the Vatican’s skepticism toward AI could influence Western governments but would not be received in China. In the same talk, Thiel predicted that there would “be a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,” adding, “The Republican Party doesn’t matter that much. It’s the less important one. When the Democratic Party goes, this country is over.” (CNN)
JD Vance raises $4.2 million from Silicon Valley’s elite. The fundraiser was held last week at the home of right-wing tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya and cohosted by Goldman Sachs managing director John Underwood. In attendance were Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Lip-Bu Tan, who leads Intel. (Axios)
Top Republican donor given role on Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Marc Andreessen, a billionaire venture capitalist, was ostensibly appointed to the role because of his firm’s investments in numerous startups developing drones and software for the military. (Responsible Statecraft)
Amazon to pay $2.25 million to settle identity theft case with Federal Trade Commission. The government accused the Jeff Bezos-founded retail giant of knowingly violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act “by refusing to provide transaction records to consumers whose personal information was used by identity thieves to commit fraud.” (FTC)
Centibillionaire Sergey Brin ditches New York real estate investment over rent-stabilized apartments. Brin, the Google cofounder and the world’s third-richest person, sold his stake in a New York City real estate fund that owns thousands of rental units. The fund has struggled to turn a profit on its holdings in rent-stabilized properties, prompting Brin to sell his stake for pennies on the dollar. His divestment came shortly after the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who promised to lower housing costs for New Yorkers. (Bloomberg)
Musk said: 'The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.' https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-empathy-quote/
All the suffering he's created is intentional. He's simply a horrible person.
Musk is delusional. No surprise there, but denying the damage he’s caused makes it perfectly clear. How can someone become so rich and yet be so ignorant?