Elon Musk bashes 'liar' Bono over DOGE cuts criticism

Article content

Elon Musk is firing back at Bono after the singer tried to outline how the billionaire’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths in developing countries.

During an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week, the U2 frontman claimed DOGE slashing funding to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) led to more than 300,000 deaths worldwide.

He landed on that jaw-dropping number after a report by Brooke Nichols, a mathematical health modeler at Boston University, projected what the toll was after the USAID cuts.

According to a report published by the Washington Post last week, Nichols’ model showed about 96,000 adults and 200,000 children have died because of the administration’s cutbacks to funding for aid groups and support organizations. By her estimate, the overall death count grows by 103 people an hour.

But Nichols offered caveats as she considered fallout from the department’s $40-billion budget being cut.

“The biggest uncertainties in all of these estimates are: 1) the extent to which countries and organizations have pivoted to mitigate this disaster (likely highly variable),” Nichols said in the Washington Post. “And 2) which programs are actually still funded with funding actually flowing — and which aren’t.”

“There’s food rotting in boats and warehouses,” Bono said during a Friday appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “There is 50,000 tons of food. The people who knew the codes — who were responsible for distributing that aid — were fired. That’s not America, is it?”

Rogan, however, asserting that USAID was “a money-laundering operation.”

“For sure, there was no oversight, no receipts … Trillions that are unaccounted for,” Rogan said. 

Reacting to a viral clip of Bono’s claims in the conversation with Rogan, Elon Musk also took aim at the musician directly.

“He’s such a liar/idiot,” Musk wrote. “Zero people have died!”

Back in February, Musk on X called USAID “a criminal organization.” His comments came after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered a halt on U.S. foreign aid.

According to Bloomberg, that order left many aid recipients, especially across Africa and in Ukraine, scrambling. The agency provides support for everything from humanitarian projects to health initiatives to disaster relief.

In his conversation with Rogan, Bono said that he was sympathetic to the American people wanting more transparency about how their tax dollars were being spent, but warned the cuts to USAID would have devastating consequences.

“To destroy, to vandalize, it felt like with glee, that these life support systems were being pulled out of the walls,” Bono said, citing a story in Christianity Today in which one worker said: “We don’t have the funds, we have to choose which child to pull off the IVs.”

“It just seems to me, I don’t know if ‘evil’ is too strong a word, but what we know about pure evil is that it rejoices in the deaths, in the squandering of human life — particularly children,” Bono said. “It actually rejoices in it. And whether it’s incompetence, whether it’s unintended consequences, it’s not too late for people.” 

Rogan countered “there’s got to be a way to keep aid and not have fraud.”

“We help the world and when you’re talking about making wells for people in the Congo to get fresh water, when you’re talking about food and medicine to places that don’t have access, no way that should have been cut out. And that should have been clear before they make these radical cuts,” Rogan added.

Rogan also said that while Musk has suggested the cuts, nothing has been finalized yet.

“The ironic thing is, even though Elon Musk has proposed all these things and the DOGE committee has proposed all these things, they’ve made no cuts in terms of the budget. They’ve cut nothing,” he said.

On X, numerous people took shots at Bono, with popular right-wing influencer Catturd writing, “I agree 100% with Elon Musk that Bono is an idiot and a liar.”

Conservative personality Oli London took aim at Bono’s wealth: “Bono is worth an estimated $700 million. He could single handedly save 300,000 lives and still have millions left over.”

Back in March, Nicholas Enrich, then USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health, estimated that a funding freeze would lead to at least 12.5 million cases of malaria, with an additional 71,000 to 166,000 deaths annually, a 28% to 32% increase in tuberculosis globally and an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year.

Bono said Secretary of State Marco Rubio was “convinced people aren’t dying yet.”

Last week, Rubio said it was “a lie” people died because of USAID cuts.

“The United States is the largest humanitarian provider on the planet,” he said, according to the Post. “I would argue: How many people die because China hasn’t done it? How many people have died because the U.K. has cut back on spending and so has other countries?”

But Nichols maintained the abrupt halt in funding is “what makes the U.S. approach so harmful.”

“It leads to interruptions in care, broken supply chains, and ultimately, preventable deaths. Also, exactly because the U.S. is the largest provider of humanitarian aid, it makes the approach catastrophic,” she told the Post.

Last week, during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Bono warned that “there will be trouble” following Trump’s cuts to foreign aid.

“We’ve got a lot of very religious Catholics, Evangelicals, Conservatives who are very, very, very angry with the person that they voted into office having demolished instruments of mercy and compassion like USAID or PEPFAR (United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), which can save 26 million lives of people who have AIDS around the world,” Bono said.

“That’s the America that we love. That’s the America that we all want to be part of. And they are not happy, and there will be trouble.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com